ITEP's Research Priorities
- Blog
- Cannabis Taxes
- Corporate Taxes
- Corporate Taxes
- Earned Income Tax Credit
- Education Tax Breaks
- Estate Tax
- Federal Policy
- Fines and Fees
- Immigration
- Income Taxes
- Inequality and the Economy
- ITEP Work in Action
- Local Income Taxes
- Local Policy
- Local Property Taxes
- Local Refundable Tax Credits
- Local Sales Taxes
- Maps
- News Releases
- Personal Income Taxes
- Property Taxes
- Property Taxes
- Publications
- Refundable Tax Credits
- Sales, Gas and Excise Taxes
- Sales, Gas and Excise Taxes
- SALT Deduction
- Select Media Mentions
- Social Media
- Staff
- Staff Quotes
- State Corporate Taxes
- State Policy
- State Reports
- States
- Tax Analyses
- Tax Basics
- Tax Credits for Workers and Families
- Tax Credits for Workers and Families
- Tax Reform Options and Challenges
- Taxing Wealth and Income from Wealth
- Trump Tax Policies
- Who Pays?
-
ITEP Work in Action March 31, 2019 Connecticut Voices for Children: Connecticut’s Radical New Budget Rules: Locking in Decreased Investment in our State for the Next Decade
Faced with increasingly difficult decisions in crafting the Fiscal Year (FY) 2018-19 biennial budget, the Connecticut General Assembly found itself at an impasse. In order to break the log jam,… -
blog March 29, 2019 ICYMI: A Brief Summary of Our March Blogs and Reports
This month in tax policy news: Corporate profits soar while corporate tax collections plummet. Also inside: A look at regressive state tax policies and progressive remedies and the continued unpackaging of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. It’s ITEP’s March 2019 Monthly Digest.
-
blog March 27, 2019 The Trump Tax Law Further Tilted an Already Uneven Playing Field
Proponents sold the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) as a way to spur new investment, increase workers’ paychecks, and reverse the off-shoring of jobs. Testimony presented during a House Ways and Means hearing held today reflected on how—more than a year after the law’s passage—each of those pitches ring hollow.
-
ITEP Work in Action March 25, 2019 Policy Matters Ohio: Senate Transportation Budget Zeroes Out Public Transit, Slightly Improves EITC
Last week, the Ohio Senate took a leap backwards by removing $100 million for public transit from the Transportation Budget allocated by the Ohio House of Representatives. They also took… -
blog March 25, 2019 Corporate Profits ?, Corporate Federal Tax Collections ?
Data released Friday by the U.S. Treasury Department should give great pause to all who care about the federal government’s ability to raise revenue in a fair, sustainable way. In the wake of the 2017 corporate tax overhaul, corporate tax collections have fallen at a rate never seen during a period of economic growth.
-
blog March 22, 2019 Unfair State Tax Codes Also Exacerbate Racial Inequity
A 2019 ITEP analysis found that Black and Latinx households are overrepresented in the lowest-income quintiles; while they represent about 22 percent of overall tax returns, they account for 30 percent of the poorest quintile of taxpayers.
-
ITEP Work in Action March 20, 2019 North Carolina Justice Center: Higher Rates on Higher Income: Why a Graduated Income Tax is Good Policy for North Carolina
At the same time, a graduated rate structure — in contrast with the state’s current flat tax rate on income — can make more revenue available for key public investments,… -
blog March 15, 2019 Rep. Doggett and Sen. Whitehouse Reintroduce Bill to End Offshore Tax Avoidance
On Thursday, Representative Lloyd Doggett and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse announced that they are reintroducing the “No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act.” Our international corporate tax rules have been a mess for a long time, and Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) failed to resolve the problems. The old rules and the new rules under TCJA both tax offshore corporate profits more lightly than domestic corporate profits, but in different ways. The No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act would create rules that tax domestic profits and foreign profits in the same way.
-
ITEP Work in Action March 15, 2019 State Millionaires’ Taxes Can Advance Racial Justice
Millionaires’ taxes can help address this problem. They can raise substantial revenue for public services by asking more of those at the top, a group that’s disproportionately white. White families are three times likelier than Black and Latinx families to be in the top 1 percent, according to a report by Prosperity Now and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
-
ITEP Work in Action March 12, 2019 Policy Matters Ohio: Loopholes Upon Loopholes
As noted, of the three deductions, by far the most taxpayers took advantage of the deduction for self-employment taxes. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which has a model… -
news release March 7, 2019 Gov. Pritzker’s Tax Proposal Is a Huge Step Toward Fairer Taxes
Gov. Pritzker’s Fair Tax proposal reflects a necessary and strong commitment to reforming Illinois’s tax system in a fair way that will help the state raise the revenue it needs to stabilize its finances and improve quality of life for all its residents. The state’s financial crisis spans several years and getting the state back on firm fiscal footing requires bold solutions and—yes—tax increases.
-
blog March 6, 2019 How State Tax Systems Worsen the Economic Divide – in Charts
The nation is currently engaging in serious discourse about how to expand economic opportunity and remedy income inequality via the federal tax code. State tax systems are also important and have a dismal effect on the growing economic divide. In a new report, Fairness Matters: A Chart Book on Who Pays State and Local Taxes, we further parse our Who Pays? data.
-
report March 6, 2019 Fairness Matters: A Chart Book on Who Pays State and Local Taxes
There is significant room for improvement in state and local tax codes. State tax codes are filled with top-heavy exemptions and deductions and often fail to tax higher incomes at higher rates. States and localities have come to rely too heavily on regressive sales taxes that fail to reflect the modern economy. And overall tax collections are often inadequate in the short-run and unsustainable in the long-run. These types of shortcomings provide compelling reason to pursue state and local tax reforms to make these systems more equitable, adequate, and sustainable.
-
ITEP Work in Action March 5, 2019 Georgia Budget and Policy Institute: Georgia Work Credit Grows the Middle Class
A non-refundable Georgia Work Credit would cut state taxes for more than 700,000 lower and middle-income households by up to $475. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates that… -
news release February 28, 2019 Education Department Tax Credit Proposal Would Undermine Public Schools
The Education Department today announced a proposed new federal tax credit for so-called school choice. The $5 billion proposal would give those who donate to private school voucher programs a tax credit. Following is a statement by Carl Davis, research director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
-
February 28, 2019 Americans have long wanted progressive taxes but few, if any, lawmakers publicly backed this view. What’s happening now isn’t a shift in public opinion, rather it’s Washington finally catching up… -
ITEP Work in Action February 27, 2019 Public News Service: Could Fast-Moving Tax-Cut Proposal Blow WV Budget?
House Bill 3137 would create a fund where new money, including out-of-state online sales taxes, would go. Then, each time that fund reached a certain level, it would trigger compounding… -
blog February 26, 2019 Overdue Gas Tax Hikes are Back on the Agenda in Statehouses
State tax policy can be a contentious topic, but one issue on which lawmakers largely agree is that higher gas tax rates are necessary to keep our nation’s infrastructure operating safely and efficiently. Lawmakers in 27 states have approved gas tax increases since 2013.
-
ITEP Work in Action February 25, 2019 Chicago Resilient Families Task Force: Big Shoulders, Bold Solutions: Economic Security for Chicagoans
People with low and middle-incomes are financially savvy in ways that are often underestimated, but despite this are on thin ice financially. Despite doing all the right things, they are… -
ITEP Work in Action February 25, 2019 West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy: House Income Tax Cut Plan Mostly Benefits Wealthy and Puts Large Holes in the State Budget (HB 3137)
According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a one-percentage reduction in each personal income tax rate would give a West Virginian with an income between $36,000 and $56,000… -
media mention February 22, 2019 Bloomberg: Amazon Doesn’t Plan to Pay the IRS Anything This Tax Season
The fact that Amazon can legally reduce its tax bill to nothing calls into question the effectiveness of the code, said Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute of… -
media mention February 22, 2019 InsideSources: Amazon Paid Zero Corporate Taxes Last Year. Why Aren’t 2020 Democrats Talking About It?
“I blame Congress,” says Matt Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy which first released the news of Amazon’s zero corporate tax bill. “Unless we… -
media mention February 22, 2019 Financial Post: Lawrence Solomon: Amazon Is Fleecing Taxpayers. Strangely, Socialists Are the Ones Saving Us
According to the non-partisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, while profitable major corporations have paid an average of over 21 per cent in federal taxes, over the last 10 years Amazon’s use of tax loopholes has lowered its average to just three per cent. In the last two years, during which it earned US$16.8 billion in profits, it paid no federal income tax at all, thanks to its use of unspecified tax credits and executive stock options.
-
media mention February 22, 2019 The Guardian: Why Didn’t Amazon Pay Federal Taxes for the Second Consecutive Year?
Amazon is already getting plenty of benefits from the federal government. The company nearly doubled its profits to $11.2bn in 2018 from $5.6bn the year before and, for the second year running didn’t pay a single cent of federal income tax. In fact, Amazon reported a federal income tax rebate for the past two years totalling almost $270m according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy analysis of Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Netflix also paid no federal or income tax on profits of $845m last year.
-
media mention February 21, 2019 Irish Examiner: New EU Competition Commissioner Must Take on US Tech Giants, Says ISME
“The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy report in Washington DC has noted that Amazon enjoyed a negative tax rate in the US in 2018. That is not a misprint.…