Citations

Buying a home is a goal for most hard-working Wyoming families, and achieving it is a cause to celebrate. But many homeowners in recent years have opened their annual property tax bills and been jolted by huge increases. In fact, residential property tax bills in Wyoming have gone up by an average of more than 80 percent over the past six years.

According to a new report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), Wyoming has several options to generate new tax revenue from our ultra-wealthy residents and decrease the state’s reliance on boom-and-bust fossil fuels—even while keeping taxes low on the middle class. All we need to do is tax Jackson. Read more.

A new study released today by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) and Better Wyoming finds that the lowest-income Wyomingites pay an effective tax rate more than three times higher than the state’s richest residents. Wyoming’s tax rate gap between the working poor and the ultra-rich is one of the worst in the nation.

Alaska stopped collecting income taxes 35 years ago, and Wyoming has never remotely considered implementing one in the 82 years since it decided instead to charge state and local sales taxes. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) discovered recently that nearly 82 percent of Alaskans could expect to pay less under a progressive income tax than they would under a sales tax designed to generate an identical level of revenue.

Wrong. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), a D.C. think tank that studies state tax policy, Wyoming’s wealthiest residents pay the lowest tax rate in the country. Meanwhile, people at the bottom 20 percent of Wyoming’s shaky economic ladder pay taxes at seven-times the rate that the top one percent of earners do. That’s the largest tax rate discrepancy between rich and poor in the United States.