•   December 13, 2017

    Updated Tax Contributions of Young Undocumented Immigrants

    In September 2017, US Citizenship and Immigration Services released updated enrollment data for the program Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). The updated data included estimates of the number of former DACA enrollees that were now legal permanent residents and those that failed to reapply or their reapplication was denied. The table below provides updated estimates of their tax contributions.

  • blog   December 7, 2017

    Charitable, Property Tax, and Mortgage Interest Deductions Would Be Wiped Out for Two-Thirds of Current Claimants Under Congressional Tax Plans

    In the ongoing debate over major federal tax legislation, there is significant focus on how House and Senate bills would eliminate the deduction for state income tax payments and cap the deduction for property taxes at $10,000 per year. At the same time, tax writers have retained deductions for charitable gifts and mortgage interest with what appear to be comparatively minor changes, at least at first glance.

  • ITEP Work in Action   December 1, 2017

    Fiscal Policy Institute: Dream Act: What’s At Stake for New York

    There are 76,000 young immigrants who were potentially eligible for DACA that call New York home. They currently contribute a total of $115 million to local and state taxes annually…
  • blog   November 30, 2017

    A Corporate Tax Cut Would Benefit Coastal Investors, Not the Heartland

    The centerpiece of the House and Senate tax plans is a major tax cut for profitable corporations that the American public does not want, and that will overwhelmingly benefit a small number of wealthy investors living in traditionally “blue” states. New ITEP research shows that poorer states such as West Virginia, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Tennessee would be largely left behind by a corporate tax cut, while the lion’s share of the benefits would remain with a relatively small number of wealthy investors who tend to be concentrated in larger cities near the nation’s coasts.

  • report   November 29, 2017

    Six More Things to Know About the Senate Tax Plan

    A recent ITEP study concluded that the tax bill before the Senate would raise taxes on at least 29 percent of Americans and cause the populations of 19 states to pay more in federal taxes in 2027 than they do today, while providing foreign investors with more benefits than American households. This report delves deeper by breaking out impacts of different components of the Senate tax plan on U.S. taxpayers in 2019 and 2027. This approach leads to several conclusions.

  • ITEP Work in Action   November 21, 2017

    Senate Tax Plan Harms Low- and Middle-Income Kentuckians to Pay for Giveaways to Those at the Top

    Senators will return to Capitol Hill next week after the Thanksgiving recess for a potential vote on their revised plan. According to estimates from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), the bottom 60 percent of Kentuckians, who make an average of $37,500 a year, will actually face more taxes from the plan with an average increase of $80 in 2027.

  •   November 18, 2017

    How the Revised Senate Tax Bill Will Affect North Dakota Residents’ Federal Taxes

    Updated November 18, 2017  The revised Senate tax plan approved by the Finance Committee on November 16th  would raise taxes on many low- and middle-income families while bestowing immense benefits on…
  • ITEP Work in Action   November 14, 2017

    Arizona Center for Economic Progress: Just Like the House GOP Plan, the Senate GOP Tax Plan Is Another Handout to the Wealthiest Households and Large Corporations

    Newly published data shows that the new Senate GOP tax plan isn’t much better than the House GOP tax plan for the middle-class, small businesses, and lower-income Americans. The Institute…
  • blog   November 13, 2017

    House Tax Bill Would Put Property Tax Deduction Out of Reach for Most Households

    The House of Representatives is expected to vote this week on a bill that would reduce federal revenues by roughly $1.5 trillion over the next decade. Despite the bill’s high…
  • blog   November 9, 2017

    Flawed Data from House Leadership Attempts to Hide Tax Hikes Under Proposal

    In a story published yesterday evening, Politico reported that House leaders have been “working to create customized data models” to show lawmakers that their constituents will not face a tax increase under the tax bill being debated in the House. On this point, House leaders have taken on an impossible task.

  • ITEP Work in Action   November 6, 2017

    Arizona Center for Economic Progress: With Further Analysis Completed, It’s Time to Call the GOP Tax Plan What it Is: Welfare for the Wealthy

    A 50-state analysis of the House tax plan released last week reveals that in Arizona the wealthiest 1% of Arizonans will receive the greatest share of the total tax cut in year…
  • blog   October 31, 2017

    Trump Administration Might Propose a Long-Overdue Gas Tax Increase

    The Trump Administration is reportedly considering backing a 7-cent increase in the federal gas tax next year to pay for improvements in the nation’s infrastructure. While most of the tax policy ideas coming from the administration in recent weeks would undermine the nation’s ability to fund core public services, this one is a notable exception.

  • report   October 26, 2017

    Trickle-Down Dries Up: States without personal income taxes lag behind states with the highest top tax rates

    Lawmakers who support reducing or eliminating state personal income taxes typically claim that doing so will spur economic growth. Often, this claim is accompanied by the assertion that states without income taxes are booming, and that their success could be replicated by any state that abandons its income tax. To help evaluate these arguments, this study compares the economic performance of the nine states without broad-based personal income taxes to their mirror opposites—the nine states levying the highest top marginal personal income tax rates throughout the last decade.

  • ITEP Work in Action   October 18, 2017

    Michigan League for Public Policy: Immigrant families in Michigan: A state profile

    Michigan immigrants also contribute millions in tax revenue each year, and in doing so help pay for important public programs and infrastructure in the state. In 2015 for example, undocumented…
  • blog   October 18, 2017

    Tax Foundation Updates Its Problematic Wishlist for State Tax Policy

    This week the Tax Foundation published its 2018 State Business Tax Climate Index, or as University of Iowa economist Peter Fisher has nicknamed it, the “Waste of Time Index.”

  • blog   September 15, 2017

    Poverty is Down, But State Tax Codes Could Bring It Even Lower

    The U.S. Census Bureau released its annual data on income, poverty and health insurance coverage this week. For the second consecutive year, the national poverty rate declined and the well-being of America’s most economically vulnerable has generally improved. In 2016, the year of the latest available data, 40.6 million (or nearly 1 in 8) Americans were living in poverty.

  • report   September 14, 2017

    State Tax Codes as Poverty Fighting Tools

    Astonishingly, tax policies in virtually every state make it harder for those living in poverty to make ends meet. When all the taxes imposed by state and local governments are taken into account, every state imposes higher effective tax rates on poor families than on the richest taxpayers.

  • ITEP Work in Action   September 12, 2017

    New Jersey Policy Perspective: Reforming New Jersey’s Income Tax Would Help Build Shared Prosperity

    These reforms would also make New Jersey’s tax system more equitable, but it would not undo the tax code’s upside-down nature, in which low-income and middle-class New Jerseyans pay greater shares of their incomes to state and local taxes than wealthy residents. With these changes, this inequity would be slightly evened out. The share paid by the top 1 percent would rise to 7.7 percent from 7.1 percent, but that would still be lower than any other group of New Jersey families.

  • brief   September 11, 2017

    Reducing the Cost of Child Care Through State Tax Codes in 2017

    Low- and middle-income working parents spend a significant portion of their income on child care. As the number of parents working outside of the home continues to rise, child care expenses have become an unavoidable and increasingly unaffordable expense. This policy brief examines state tax policy tools that can be used to make child care more affordable: a dependent care tax credit modeled after the federal program and a deduction for child care expenses.

  • brief   September 11, 2017

    Property Tax Circuit Breakers in 2017

    State lawmakers seeking to make residential property taxes more affordable have two broad options: across-the-board tax cuts for taxpayers at all income levels, such as a homestead exemption or a tax cap, and targeted tax breaks that are given only to particular groups of low- and middle-income taxpayers. One such targeted program to reduce property taxes is called a “circuit breaker” because it protects taxpayers from a property tax “overload” just like an electric circuit breaker: when a property tax bill exceeds a certain percentage of a taxpayer’s income, the circuit breaker reduces property taxes in excess of this “overload” level. This policy brief surveys the advantages and disadvantages of the circuit breaker approach to reducing property taxes.

  • brief   September 11, 2017

    Options for a Less Regressive Sales Tax in 2017

    Sales taxes are one of the most important revenue sources for state and local governments; however, they are also among the most unfair taxes, falling more heavily on low- and middle-income households. Therefore, it is important that policymakers nationwide find ways to make sales taxes more equitable while preserving this important source of funding for public services. This policy brief discusses two approaches to a less regressive sales tax: broad-based exemptions and targeted sales tax credits.

  • brief   September 11, 2017

    Rewarding Work Through State Earned Income Tax Credits in 2017

    The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is a policy designed to bolster the earnings of low-wage workers and offset some of the taxes they pay, providing the opportunity for struggling families to step up and out of poverty toward meaningful economic security. The federal EITC has kept millions of Americans out of poverty since its enactment in the mid-1970s. Over the past several decades, the effectiveness of the EITC has been magnified as many states have enacted and later expanded their own credits.

  • ITEP Work in Action   September 5, 2017

    Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families: The Trump Tax Plan: What Would It Mean for Arkansas?

    Who benefits and who loses under the Trump tax plan? An analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) estimates that Arkansas would fare worse under the plan compared to other states. Relative to our share of the U.S. population, we would be one of the 12 states receiving the lowest share of the total Trump tax cut.

  • ITEP Work in Action   September 1, 2017

    New Mexico Voices for Children: The Trump Tax Plan Isn’t ‘Reform.’ Here’s Why:

    In April the Trump administration released a sketchy outline of their half-baked ideas for tax changes. An analysis by the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) of that back-of-the-envelope ‘plan’ found that nearly half (48 percent) of Trump’s proposed tax cuts would go to millionaires. Millionaires make up only 0.5 percent of the U.S. population.

  • ITEP Work in Action   August 31, 2017

    New Mexico Voices for Children: Trump Tax Plan Does Little for NM’s Middle Class

    Average New Mexicans would not benefit much from President Trump’s tax reform proposal, which would give the biggest tax breaks to New Mexico’s millionaires. That’s according to a report released recently by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP).