Blog
Circuit Breakers Are a Better Option for Property Tax Relief
March 13, 2025 • By Brakeyshia Samms
To curb the impact of property taxes on working families, lawmakers should improve or implement a property tax circuit breaker program. The program works like this: when families are overloaded with their property taxes, the circuit breaker kicks in and helps alleviate the pressure these taxes put on family budgets.
A Well Targeted Federal Renter Credit Could Help Reduce Wealth Gaps
March 3, 2025 • By Brakeyshia Samms
While lawmakers often speak about income inequality, less attention is paid to wealth inequality. Wealth is distributed even more unequally than income in the U.S. in ways that reinforce racial divides, leave some households with too little to handle unexpected expenses, and enable some households to pass down enormous intergenerational wealth. A renter tax credit is one tool lawmakers can use to reduce wealth inequalities both within racial and ethnic groups and between these groups. As we show in our new analysis, Black and Hispanic households are more likely to be renters and hold less wealth than white households.
Learn from Prop 13 History to Avoid Repeating Past Mistakes
February 26, 2025 • By Rita Jefferson
Worries about housing costs and property tax bills are leading people to check the history books for solutions, but there’s a danger that they’ll repeat past mistakes. If anti-tax lawmakers carelessly weaken property taxes as they did in the 1970s, as they did with California’s Proposition 13, they will undercut public finances, making municipalities, school districts, and other special districts worse off.
In the face of immense uncertainty around looming federal tax and budget decisions, many of which could threaten state budgets, state lawmakers have an opportunity to show up for their constituents by raising and protecting the revenue needed to fund shared priorities. Lawmakers have a choice: advance tax policies that improve equity and help communities thrive, or push tax policies that disproportionately benefit the wealthy, drain funding for critical public services, and make it harder for most families to get ahead.
Policymakers Unwisely Propose Cutting Property Taxes in Favor of Sales Taxes
January 14, 2025 • By Rita Jefferson
Lawmakers across the country are taking aim at property taxes with a new strategy: raising sales taxes instead. Doing so would create a regressive tax shift that puts unfair burdens on renters and reduces the strength of local government revenues.
On Election Day, Voters Across the Country Chose to Invest in Their States & Communities
November 19, 2024 • By Kamolika Das
On election day, voters across the country — in states red and blue and communities rural and urban — approved a wide range of state and local ballot measures on taxation and public investment. The success of these measures clearly shows that voters are willing to invest in public priorities that feel tangible and close to home.
Billionaires and businesses have too much power in Washington. Tax revenue is needed to pay for things we all need. If we want economic justice, racial justice and climate justice, we must have tax justice.
2024 Local Tax Ballot Measures: Voters in Dozens of Communities Will Shape Local Policy
October 17, 2024 • By Rita Jefferson
Next month, voters across the country will weigh in on many local ballot measures that will have a profound effect on the adequacy of our local tax systems and whether cities and communities can fund public needs. These are in addition to statewide ballot questions, many of which have local implications this year.
Many cities, counties, and townships across the country are in a difficult, or at least unstable, budgetary position. Localities are responding to these financial pressures in a variety of ways with some charging ahead with enacting innovative reforms like short-term rental and vacancy taxes, and others setting up local tax commissions to study the problem.
Major tax cuts were largely rejected this year, but states continue to chip away at income taxes. And while property tax cuts were a hot topic across the country, many states failed to deliver effective solutions to affordability issues.
Property Tax Circuit Breakers Can Help States Create More Equitable Tax Codes
June 24, 2024 • By Brakeyshia Samms
Well-designed property tax circuit breaker programs allow states to reduce the impact that property taxes have on the upside-down tilt of their tax codes.
Juneteenth is a reminder of the hard-fought victories that helped Black Americans secure their delayed freedom, justice, and suffrage. And in the chapters about tax policy, the tales are no less fraught. From America’s prologue to the last paragraph of the Civil War, governments raised more tax revenue from the taxation of Black bodies than […]
Tax History Matters: A Q&A with Professor Andrew Kahrl, Author of ‘The Black Tax’
April 24, 2024 • By Brakeyshia Samms
In his new book, The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America, Professor Andrew Kahrl walks readers through the history of the property tax system and its structural defects that have led to widespread discrimination against Black Americans.
Ahead of the ‘Bring Chicago Home’ Vote, Remember That Local Mansion Taxes are Tried and Tested
March 14, 2024 • By Andrew Boardman, Kamolika Das
As Chicago and other localities look for ways to shore up resources for critical public investments, it's important to remember that over a dozen cities and counties have already benefited from policies like mansion taxes.
2023’s State and Local Tax Ballot Measures: Voters to Weigh in on Property Taxes, Wealth Taxes, and More
October 24, 2023 • By Jon Whiten
Even in this slow year for candidate elections, the decisions that voters in states and cities make could strengthen or weaken revenue for needs in their communities and could change how taxes are distributed across the income spectrum. In the places where tax fairness is on the ballot, much is at stake.
States are Talking About the Wrong Kind of Property Tax Cuts
May 11, 2023 • By Brakeyshia Samms, Carl Davis
Concerns over property tax affordability have been at the forefront this year as housing prices have climbed and property tax bills have often increased along with them. As lawmakers mull a range of property tax cuts, circuit breakers are the best possible approach—and these policies are receiving far too little attention in the states.
State Lawmakers Should Break the 2023 Tax Cut Fever Before It’s Too Late
January 18, 2023 • By Miles Trinidad
Despite mixed economic signals for 2023, including a possible recession, many state lawmakers plan to use temporary budget surpluses to forge ahead with permanent, regressive tax cuts that would disproportionately benefit the wealthy at the expense of low- and middle-income households. These cuts would put state finances in a precarious position and further erode public investments in education, transportation and health, all of which are crucial for creating inclusive, vibrant communities where everyone, not just the rich, can achieve economic security and thrive. In the event of an economic downturn, these results would be accelerated and amplified.
Tax Foundation’s ‘State Business Tax Climate Index’ Bears Little Connection to Business Reality
October 31, 2022 • By Carl Davis, Matthew Gardner
The big problem with the Index is that it peddles a solution that not only falls short of the goal of generating business investment, but one that actively harms state lawmakers’ ability to provide the kinds of public goods – like good schools and modern, efficient transportation networks – that businesses need and want.
Racial Discrimination in Home Appraisals Is a Problem That’s Now Getting Federal Attention
March 31, 2022 • By Brakeyshia Samms
With both assessments and appraisals being unfair, homeowners of color are stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to determining the worth of what is, for most homeowners, their most valuable asset.
The Pendulum Is Swinging Toward Tax Justice
January 5, 2022 • By ITEP Staff, Jenice Robinson, Kamolika Das
Tax justice is deeply connected to the movements for equality and racial justice. Progressive tax policy can ensure more of us share in the prosperous economy that our collective tax dollars make possible. It can mitigate economic disparities by class and race. And it can make sure the government has the resources it needs to function for all of us.
New Census Data Highlight Need for Permanent Child Tax Credit Expansion
September 14, 2021 • By Neva Butkus
The status quo was a choice, but the Census data released today shows that different policy choices can create drastically different outcomes for children and families. It is time for our state and federal legislators to put people first when it comes to recovery.
Why Local Governments Need an Anti-Racist Approach to Property Assessments
August 5, 2021 • By Ambika Sinha
Property taxes are among the oldest and most relied upon form of local taxes. Revenue raised from these taxes funds education, firefighting, law enforcement, street and infrastructure maintenance, and other essential services. Though all members of the community enjoy these public goods, homeowners of color, especially Black families, pay more as a share of home value in property taxes than their white counterparts.
Gentrification and the Property Tax: How Circuit Breakers Can Help
April 27, 2021 • By David Crawford
Property tax circuit breakers are effective because they provide property tax relief to families whose property taxes surpass a certain percentage of their income. If a family in a gentrifying area sees their property tax bill (or their rent) surge to an unaffordable level, a circuit breaker credit kicks in to offer relief. This targeted approach assists low- and middle-income families without significantly reducing overall tax revenue.
After the Dust Has Settled: How Progressive Tax Policy Fared in the General Election
November 30, 2020 • By Marco Guzman
While the results of the 2020 presidential election are all but set in stone—and a sign of life for progressive policy—the results of state tax ballot initiatives are more of a mixed bag. However, the overall fight for tax equity and raising more revenue to invest in people and communities is trending in the right direction.
Voters Have the Chance in 2020 to Increase Tax Equity in Arizona, Illinois, and California, And They Should
October 22, 2020 • By Marco Guzman
There’s a lot at stake in this election cycle: the nation and our economy are reeling from the effects brought on by the coronavirus pandemic and states remain in limbo as they weigh deep budget cuts and rush to address projected revenue shortfalls.
Blog Categories
Institute on Taxation
and Economic Policy
ITEP is a non-profit, non-partisan tax policy organization. We conduct rigorous analyses of tax and economic proposals and provide data-driven recommendations to shape equitable and sustainable tax systems.
Subscribe to ITEP Emails
Tax research and policy news in your inbox.
Promote Fair Tax Policy
Your gift to ITEP promotes tax justice. With your help, we do research that supports taxing millionaires and billionaires, taxing big corporations and raising revenue for the things our people, our communities and our planet need.
Together, we can create a country with more economic justice, more racial justice, more climate justice… and more tax justice.