This election cycle, former President Donald Trump has made one campaign promise the most prominent: Mass deportation. It is a long-standing vow. In 2016, Trump said he would deport the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. Once in the White House, he ordered sweeping worksite raids, enacted a ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries, and deliberately separated migrant families, many of whom have yet to be reunited.
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media mention August 8, 2024 Mother Jones: How Trump’s “Mass Deportation” Plan Would Ruin America
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media mention August 7, 2024 New York Times: A Walzonomics Primer
It’s been nearly 24 hours since Kamala Harris announced Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate, catapulting him into the national spotlight. Unlike other candidates for the position, including Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, the Midwestern politician hasn’t been closely scrutinized — until now. Here’s where he stands on some key business issues.
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media mention August 7, 2024 Fox Business: Kamala Harris’ VP Pick: What to Know About Tim Walz’s Economic Track Record
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s economic track record is under the microscope after Vice President Harris’ decision Tuesday to select Walz as her running mate on the Democratic Party’s 2024 ticket.
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media mention August 6, 2024 Yahoo Finance: The Economic Risk of Trump’s Deportation Plan
The surge of migrants entering the United States during part of Joe Biden’s presidency has played to Donald Trump’s signature issue. Trump launched his first campaign for president in 2015 with an anti-immigrant rant, and the issue has worked for him ever since. So Trump, in his third campaign for president, has raised his bid on the issue, promising the “mass deportation” of up to 20 million people if he wins a second term.
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media mention August 5, 2024 ProPublica: How a Washington Tax Break for Data Centers Snowballed Into One of the State’s Biggest Corporate Giveaways
In 2010, as the country still reeled from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, tech companies, real estate developers and rural lobbyists went to the state Capitol in Olympia, Washington, to press for a tax break for data centers.
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media mention August 5, 2024 Boston Globe: The Hidden Tax Power of Undocumented Immigrants
A common argument among anti-immigrant politicians and advocates is that noncitizens who are in the United States illegally exploit government benefits and constitute a financial burden on the country. That claim is largely inaccurate and misleading. The latest evidence was provided this week by policy analysts and researchers at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. They found that undocumented immigrants in the United States paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022, averaging $8,889 per person.
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media mention August 1, 2024 USA Today: Report: Targeted for Deportation by Trump, Undocumented Immigrants Pay Billions in Taxes
Florida is among a half-dozen states which each collect more than $1 billion in taxes from undocumented immigrants – a flow of public money likely to disappear under Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan, a new report shows.
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media mention August 1, 2024 Newsweek: Undocumented Immigrants’ Payments Into Social Security Detailed in Report
New analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) found that undocumented residents paid £25.7 billion into Social Security funds and $6 billion into Medicare in 2022; both programs that they are not entitled to use. In total, undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion, or roughly $9,000 per person, in taxes in 2022.
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ITEP Work in Action August 1, 2024 Florida Policy Institute: Florida Should Welcome Immigrants
New research confirms that immigrants without a documented status still contribute economically, despite most not being eligible for any public services or benefits. Many immigrants without a documented status pay taxes — primarily via sales and excise taxes on purchases.[1] The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy’s (ITEP’s) latest report details the state and local taxes immigrants without a documented status contribute throughout the United States. Nationwide, ITEP finds that for every 1 million undocumented immigrant residents, revenue for public services increases by $8.9 billion.
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ITEP Work in Action August 1, 2024 Hawaiʻi Appleseed Center for Law & Economic Justice: How Hawaiʻi’s Hardworking Undocumented Immigrants Support Our Economy and Communities
Undocumented immigrants work hard in Hawaiʻi and play a vital role in our economy, boosting both our general excise and individual income tax revenue. This is despite the fact that it is more difficult for them to file taxes than for other Hawaiʻi residents. A new report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) lifts up the significant tax contributions that these immigrants make to our federal, state and local governments through the taxes they pay each year.
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ITEP Work in Action July 30, 2024 Immigration Research Initiative: People Who Are Undocumented: Occupations, Taxes Paid, and Long-Term Economic Benefits
As a July 2024 report from the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) shows, people who are undocumented paid $97 billion in taxes in 2022. A total of $34 billion comes from payroll taxes to cover programs that exclude people who are undocumented from getting benefits: $25.6 billion paid to Social Security, $6.4 billion to Medicare, and, through contributions of their employers, $1.8 billion to unemployment insurance (which is a joint federal and state program). In other words, workers who are undocumented have wages withheld or employers are required to pay for programs that benefit other Americans, but which systematically leave them behind.2
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media mention July 30, 2024 McClatchy DC: Undocumented Immigrants in California Are Paying Billions in Taxes. Here’s How Much.
Amid pledges for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants by presidential candidate Donald Trump, a new study has highlighted the increasingly positive economic effects of this community. The report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a Washington-based progressive research group, found undocumented immigrants nationwide paid an estimated $96.7 billion in taxes in 2022. About $37.3 billion was spent on state and local taxes, and the rest went to federal taxes.
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media mention July 16, 2024 Quartz: ‘Trump Trade’ Is Back in Focus
The world’s financial markets are growing increasingly open to the likelihood that former President Donald Trump will make his way to a second term in the White House. All it took was outperforming President Joe Biden on a debate stage and surviving an assassination attempt.
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media mention July 15, 2024 Route 50: States, Cities Consider ‘Mansion Taxes’ to Fund Affordable Housing
States and cities have been throwing darts at the wall, trying to find dedicated funding to tackle affordable housing needs. Nationwide, tens of millions of families are struggling amid a housing shortage with rent and housing costs. Home prices are up about 60% over the past decade, adjusted for inflation. And about a quarter of renters—some 12 million households—spend more than half their income on housing, which is far above the recommended 30%. To support affordable housing development and other initiatives in the rapidly growing Denver area, Mayor Mike Johnston on Monday unveiled a proposed new tax that would add 0.5% atop Denver’s current effective 8.81% sales tax rate. The tax is estimated to bring in $100 million a year in proceeds for the efforts.
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media mention July 11, 2024 Nonprofit Quarterly: Can Taxes Reduce Inequality? What a Study of State and Local Taxes Tells Us
Who pays? Along with its companion question of “who benefits,” “who pays” has long been a central concern of both politics and economics. Earlier this year, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) published Who Pays: A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems in All 50 States, its seventh study on the topic since 1996 and its first since 2018.
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media mention July 10, 2024 The 19th News: Republicans Want to Kill the Dept. of Ed and Privatize Education. Billionaires Are Helping Them.
In the fall, the Department of Education will mark 45 years since its inception, but that anniversary could be its last if Donald Trump gets his way. The federal agency is one of several he’s vowed to slash if reelected president.
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media mention July 10, 2024 Education Week: A State Considers a Future in Which Schools Can’t Rely on Property Taxes
What would a world without property taxes look like? In every state, revenue from property taxes is one of the biggest sources of K-12 school funding. But that could change soon as efforts ramp up in a handful of states to abandon property taxes altogether, or at least as a funding source for schools.
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media mention July 3, 2024 Connecticut Mirror: Could CT Fight Homelessness With a ‘Mansion Tax’? Yes, Report Says
State government could raise as much as $180 million annually to combat homelessness or address other social needs by boosting its tax on the sale of high-value houses, according to a recent report from two Washington fiscal think tanks.
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ITEP Work in Action July 3, 2024 The Volcker Alliance: Benefit or Burden
The issue paper addresses how US states hand out massive tax breaks every year to advance policy goals, such as aiding low-income families, spurring business investment and job creation, or mirroring the federal tax code. Known broadly as tax expenditures, these exemptions, credits, abatements, and other measures reduce state revenues by an estimated $1 trillion a year, almost three times their 2021 total state expenditures on education. Such tax expenditures, which often suffer from lax government oversight, may be leaving states short on revenue at time when the effects of climate change and the cost of deferred maintenance means that they will need to spend more on infrastructure now and in the decades ahead.
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media mention July 3, 2024 The Globalist: Will American Monetocracy Ever Come to an End?
It used to be that the United States prided itself on being a meritocracy. No more. It is increasingly a country with a cult of money and rule by moneyed elites. Not so much an oligarchy as a monetocracy.
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blog July 1, 2024 Tax the Wealthy and Reject Austerity for a More Just and Thriving Democracy
Two of the last five presidents won office over the objection of the majority of the people; California, with 65 times more people, has the same voting power in the U.S Senate as Wyoming; and the U.S. Supreme Court just permitted South Carolina lawmakers to dilute Black votes in drawing districts. These obvious flaws undermine our claim to be a strong democracy. One less appreciated but similarly undemocratic trend is our extreme inequality that supercharges the power and wealth of corporations and the uber-rich, weakens what the public sector can deliver, and often feeds on itself.
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media mention June 27, 2024 New York Times: Newsom Uses Annual State Address to Confront Republicans Across the Nation
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, whose liberal state has been hammered by Republicans for months as a hellscape of homelessness, crime and high taxes, used his annual State of the State address on Tuesday to slam “conservatives and delusional California bashers” and defend “the California way of life.”
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ITEP Work in Action June 26, 2024 U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Labor, Education, and Pensions: By the Wealthy, for the Wealthy: The Coordinated Attacks on Public Education in the United States
Public education is the cornerstone of opportunity in the United States. No matter who they are,
where they live, or how much money their parents make, every child in this nation has a
fundamental right to a public education. But in America today, the public education system—one
of the cornerstones of democracy—is under attack. -
ITEP Work in Action June 26, 2024 Americans for Tax Fairness: Engine of Inequality: A Flood of Corporate Profits Is Enriching Wealthy Shareholders Through Stock Buybacks and Dividends, At The Expense of Workers and The Public
All but a handful of 280 large, profitable corporations spent more money making their wealthy shareholders richer through dividends and stock buybacks than they paid in federal income taxes in the five years after the enactment of the Trump-GOP tax law, according to a new analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness. And it wasn’t even close: altogether the stockholder payouts outstripped tax payments by 7-to-1, $4.4 trillion vs. $608 billion. This heavy bias towards shareholder payments for wealthy investors over tax payments for public services exacerbates economic inequality and promotes political instability, as increasingly frustrated American workers struggle to get by while wealthy stock investors surge ever further ahead.
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media mention June 26, 2024 Sacramento Bee: Governor Gavin Newsom Claims California Is Not a ‘High-Tax State.’ Is He Correct?
“Here’s the truth Republicans never tell you: California is not a high tax state,” Gov. Gavin Newsom declared Tuesday in his taped State of the State address.