1,134 posts
Michigan League for Public Policy: Let’s Not Make it Harder for People to Get to Work!
• By ITEP Staff
Improving the state’s roads is critical to economic growth in Michigan. Not only do people depend on the roads and public transportation to get to work, but businesses—and potential businesses—rely on safe roads to transport goods. It is imperative, however, to ensure that people can still afford to get to work if taxes are increased. […]
Policy Matters Ohio: Ohio’s Affluent are Big Beneficiaries of 2013-2014 Tax Changes
• By ITEP Staff
State tax changes approved over the past two years have further tilted Ohio’s tax system in favor of the wealthiest. Read the full report
New Mexico Voices for Children: Expanding New Mexico’s Working Families Tax Credit Would Generate Economic Activity and Help Hard-Working Families
• By ITEP Staff
New Mexico’s Working Families Tax Credit not only lifts tens of thousands of low-income families out of poverty each year, it also generates economic activity because the money is spent quickly and locally. Increasing the value of the credit would help with New Mexico’s sluggish recovery and cost the state much less than recently enacted […]
Oregon Center for Public Policy: Move Across State Lines for $40 a Month?
• By ITEP Staff
Say that you’re the sole breadwinner for your family and you earn $100,000 a year in Oregon. Would you pack your belongings and move your family north to Washington for a $40 monthly raise? It’s hard to imagine. That is why any Oregon business worried that it might lose employees to firms in Washington […]
State Tax Codes As Poverty Fighting Tools
• By Meg Wiehe
Read the Report in PDF Form The Census Bureau released data in September showing that the share of Americans living in poverty remains high. In 2013, the national poverty rate was 14.5 percent, a slight drop from last years’ rate of 15 percent and the first decline since 2006.1 However, the poverty rate remains 2.0 […]
North Carolina Justice Center: Stronger Earned Income Tax Credit and Minimum Wage – Both Needed to Help Low-Wage Working Families
• By ITEP Staff
There are two critical policy tools that can help put low-wage workers on the path to economic security: the minimum wage and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Together these policies ensure that working families can maximize their take-home pay to help make ends meet. Read the full report
Policy Matters Ohio: Out-of-Step
• By ITEP Staff
Changes to the Ohio EITC this summer doubled the credit, but poor design choices mean that most low-income working families won’t get the benefit. Read the full report
Policy Matters Ohio: The Great Ohio Tax Shift
• By ITEP Staff
Tax overhauls in the past nine years have slashed average tax bills for the top 1 percent by more than $20,000, while the bottom three-fifths pay more as a group. Read the full report
Sales Tax Holidays: An Ineffective Alternative to Real Sales Tax Reform
• By Meg Wiehe
Sales taxes are an important revenue source, comprising close to half of all state revenues in 2013. But sales taxes are also inherently regressive because the lower a family's income, the more of its income the family must spend on things subject to the tax.
Fiscal Policy Institute: NYS Can Help Low-income Working Families with Children by Increasing its Earned Income Tax Credit
• By ITEP Staff
It comes as no surprise to working families that New York State’s tax system is fundamentally unfair. Low- and middle-income workers pay, on average, a much higher share of their income in state and local taxes than the highest income earners. According to analysis by the Washington, D.C.-based Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the […]
Missouri Budget Project: Earned Income Tax Credit: A Targeted Tax Change with Significant Impact
• By ITEP Staff
The federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is a federal tax credit for low- and moderate-income working people. It encourages and rewards work as well as offsets federal payroll and income taxes. Read the Full Report (PDF)
New Mexico Voices for Children: New Mexico’s Capital Gains Deduction: A Capital Loss for New Mexicans
• By ITEP Staff
Legislation enacted in 2003 that allows New Mexicans with capital gains income to deduct half of that income from their state taxes has failed as an economic development tool. Further, it makes the state’s overall tax system lean more heavily on low-income families and exemplifies the need for a more robust accounting of tax giveaways. […]
New Mexico Voices for Children: Citizen’s Guide to New Mexico’s Tax System
• By ITEP Staff
Citizen’s Guide to the New Mexico State BudgetThis guide focuses on the operating budget—the annual spending for ongoing programs and services that affect the lives of every New Mexico resident. Read the Full Report (PDF)
Maryland Center on Economic Policy: Recent EITC Expansion in MD will Make Taxes More Fair, Reduce Inequality
• By ITEP Staff
Working Marylanders with the lowest earnings will pay slightly less of their income in taxes — 9.9 percent compared to 10.1 percent now – once the expansion of the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit is fully phased in, according to a new study. That’s a small change, and the top 1 percent of income earners […]
Voice for Illinois for Children: Congress Must Act to Stop Corporate Inversions
• By ITEP Staff
A number of high-profile U.S. corporations have, or are reportedly considering, corporate “inversions,” where they move their “headquarters” overseas to avoid paying U.S. corporate income taxes. Unless Congress acts, federal and state governments are set to lose, at minimum, tens of billions in revenue to support urgent priorities such as schools, roads and bridges, and […]
Options for Progressive Sales Tax Relief
• By Meg Wiehe
See the 2016 Updated Brief Here Read the Policy Brief in PDF Form Sales taxes are one of the most important revenue sources for state and local governments—and are also one of the most unfair taxes. In recent years, policymakers nationwide have struggled to find ways of making sales taxes more equitable while preserving this […]
State Estate and Inheritance Taxes
• By Meg Wiehe
For much of the last century, estate and inheritance taxes have played an important role in helping states to adequately fund public services in a way that improves the progressivity of state tax systems. While many of the taxes levied by state and local governments fall most heavily on low-income families, only the very wealthy pay estate and inheritance taxes. Recent changes in the federal estate tax, however, culminating in the "fiscal cliff " deal…
Policy Matters Ohio: Cuts and Breaks
• By ITEP Staff
Most of the $400 million-plus in tax cuts for Fiscal Year 2015 will go the affluent. The Mid-Biennium Review also continues with an unfortunate Ohio tradition of permitting or enlarging tax benefits to special, narrow groups of taxpayers. Read the Full Report
Iowa Policy Project: Immigrants in Iowa
• By ITEP Staff
Undocumented immigrants pay an estimated $64 million in state and local taxes, according to a new Iowa Policy Project report. The authors suggest immigration reform that expands work authorization or access to citizenship would increase the already significant contribution to Iowa by all immigrants — documented or not. Read the Full Report
Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics: Ten Dollars or Thirteen Dollars?
• By ITEP Staff
In this report we compare the effects of $10 (AB10) and $13 (SB935) minimum wage levels in California. We show that AB10 restores some of the ground lost by low-paid workers in recent years, but it maintains the inflation-adjusted minimum wage at about the same level as in 1988. The Leno bill, SB935, goes much […]
Georgia Budget & Policy Institute: Fix Education, Other Vital Services With Viable State Revenue Options
• By ITEP Staff
Georgia continues to wrestle with the fallout of relying on a revenue system that can’t raise enough money to meet the needs of a modern, growing state. Hospitals are closing, traffic is gridlocked and local school districts are cutting calendar days and increasing class sizes. Public investments in education, transportation and other vital services are […]
New Jersey Policy Perspective: Highest-Income New Jerseyans Would Still Pay Lowest Share of Income to Taxes After Proposed Changes
• By ITEP Staff
Read the Full Report
Maine Policy Review: The Distributional Effects of Recent Changes to Maine’s Tax System
• By ITEP Staff
Both classical economic theory and recent empirical research support the notion that taxes should be progressive: that the wealthiest citizens should pay a larger share of their income in taxes than the middle class, and the middle class should pay a larger share of their income in taxes than the poor. Like every other state […]
Arise Citizens’ Policy Project: Out of Step – Alabama’s Unusual State Tax System
• By ITEP Staff
Taxes are the tools that Americans use to pay for education, public health, transportation and other elements of the common good. Just as states differ in the scale of services offered, they also differ on the ways to pay for those services. Some states lean on property taxes to fund public services, while others rely […]
Washington Budget & Policy Center: Flawed Economic Model Hurts Washington State
• By ITEP Staff
An economic model frequently cited by some Washington state lawmakers to justify their opposition to tax increases distorts the impact of tax proposals on state economies, according to a new study from the non-partisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP). The report makes it clear the Beacon Hill Institute’s State Tax Analysis Modeling Program […]
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