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ITEP Work in Action December 18, 2017 Center for Public Policy Priorities: The National Dream Act: What’s at stake for Texas?
Researchers estimate that approximately 177,000 young Texas immigrants are potentially eligible for DACA, and they currently contribute a total of $241 million to local and state taxes annually through sales… -
ITEP Work in Action December 18, 2017 Minnesota Budget Project: 4 Reasons DACA should be restored ASAP
DACA results in increased economic activity in our communities and increased tax revenues. DACA recipients in Minnesota contribute an estimated $15 million in state and local taxes annually. Read more… -
blog December 18, 2017 Corker Claims Provisions Benefiting Him Could Not Have Changed His Vote Because He Never Read the Bill
Many Republicans who had previously claimed to be deficit hawks have been cheerfully supportive of major tax-cutting legislation as it has moved forward this fall. But one Republican Senator, Bob Corker of Tennessee, has taken a defiant stance on the issue, insisting that “passing off increased debt to future generations” would be a deal-breaker for him. When the Senate passed its version of the tax plan last week, Corker was the only Republican to vote No.
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blog December 17, 2017 Final GOP-Trump Bill Still Forces California and New York to Shoulder a Larger Share of Federal Taxes Under Final GOP-Trump Tax Bill; Texas, Florida, and Other States Will Pay Less
Residents of California and New York pay a large amount of the nation’s federal personal income taxes relative to their share of the population. As illustrated by the table below, the final GOP-Trump tax bill expected to be approved this week would substantially increase the share of total federal personal income taxes (PIT) paid by both states. Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey would also see their share of federal PIT increase.
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blog December 15, 2017 GOP Leaders Scrounge Up Money to Lower Top Tax Rate for the Rich But Not to Help Low-Income Working Families with Children
Republican leaders who rejected a proposal to have corporations pay a single percentage point higher tax rate to benefit families with children have tapped the exact same source of savings to provide more breaks for the richest 1 percent of taxpayers. The table below compares the number and share of households nationally and in all 50-states who would benefit from the proposal to reduce taxes for working families with children versus the ”compromise” to cut the top individual tax rate — below either the House or Senate version – to 37 percent for couples with incomes above $1 million.
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blog December 13, 2017 All I Want for Christmas is a Clean DREAM Act
As 2017 draws to close, Congress has yet to take legislative action to protect Dreamers. The young undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children, and are largely working or in school, were protected by President Obama’s 2012 executive action, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). But in September, President Trump announced that he would end DACA in March 2018. Instead of honoring the work authorizations and protection from deportation that currently shields more than 685,000 young people, President Trump punted their lives and livelihood to a woefully divided Congress which is expected to take up legislation to address the issue this month.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.