Citations

Proponents of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” (HR 1), including all four of West Virginia’s members of Congress, have repeatedly touted the tax provisions of the legislation as benefiting most or all West Virginia families. The WVCBP has already covered in detail how the SNAP and Medicaid provisions of HR 1 are particularly harmful for West Virginians […]

Earlier this month the U.S. House of Representatives passed a major new tax and spending bill that not only represents the largest cuts to Medicaid and SNAP in history, taking away SNAP and Medicaid benefits from millions of recipients including tens of thousands in West Virginia, but also includes tax provisions that would overwhelmingly favor the richest taxpayers in […]

The West Virginia Legislature has introduced a bill to cut and eventually eliminate the state’s personal income tax. The House Finance Committee voted to advance that bill to the House floor with no discussion or questions asked. Like previous attempts to eliminate the state’s income tax, HB 4007 would lead to major revenue losses for the […]

This week, the Senate Finance Committee took up HB 3300, the House’s income tax cut plan, and made significant changes before quickly passing it out of committee. Unlike the House plan, which phased out the income tax over time with no revenue offsets, the Senate’s plan is more similar to the governor’s proposal, making a […]

Governor Justice has finally unveiled his proposal to make sweeping changes to the state’s tax system, including a substantial cut to the state’s personal income tax, while raising a variety of sales and other taxes. The changes would be a dramatic shift in who pays state taxes in West Virginia, shifting the responsibility onto working […]

Once the fund reaches “an amount equal to or exceeding 2.5 times the total net reduction in personal income tax revenue collections that would have been received in that fiscal year if the income tax rates for that fiscal year had been reduced by 0.25 percent” it triggers a reduction in the state’s personal income […]

Senate Republicans unveiled their latest proposal to eliminate the business personal property tax this week, passing the proposal out of the Senate Finance Committee. The plan, which builds upon an earlier proposal to eliminate the property tax on manufacturing equipment, machinery, and inventory, would blow a nearly $100 million hole in the state budget, introduce inconsistency in […]

To get a sense of a state’s values, one often need look no further than its tax system. What a state spends its tax dollars on and how it acquires those tax dollars typically reveals a lot about the priorities of its people—what they care about and what they stand for. In theory, it’s a […]

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 cuts in state income taxes. Ted Boettner, executive director of the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, said some lawmakers may not realize they […]

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 an average tax cut of $231 compared to $6,044 for someone in the top 1 percent with an income of above $451,000. This means someone […]

The fact that so few West Virginians pay income tax on their Social Security benefits should tell us that this is not a middle-class tax cut. As the graph and analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) below shows, the average tax change from eliminating the state income tax on Social Security […]

WOWK TV - Sean O'Leary, of the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, talks to Mark Curtis about a new report that shows there's room improve West Virginia's upside-down tax system.

State and local tax systems can be effectively used to boost economic opportunity, create broadly shared prosperity and build equitable state economies. But in most states, including West Virginia, tax systems are upside down and are making inequality worse, as a new report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) shows.

West Virginia's tax system is regarded as regressive because the lower one's income, the higher one's effective tax rate. While West Virginia has a progressive personal income (meaning the higher one's income, the higher one's effective personal income tax rate), it also, like most other states, relies heavily on the more regressive sales and excise taxes to raise revenue. Low-income West Virginians pay up to 6.6 percent of their income on sales and excise taxes, while the wealthiest in the state pay less than one percent of income in state and local sales taxes.

Extending most of these provision does more of the same and is a huge and alarming waste of resources. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economy Policy, if the individual tax provisions are extended to 2026 and beyond, the richest 1 percent – those making on average $762,000 – in West Virginia would receive an average tax cut of over $20,000. Meanwhile, the poorest 20 percent with an average income of $12,900 will see an average tax increase of $40.