In 2010, as California was moving forward with plans to raise taxes sharply on million-dollar earners, opponents issued dire warnings that the hike would drive away entrepreneurs and cripple the state economy. “There’s nothing more portable than a millionaire and his money,” warned the ranking Republican on the state Senate’s budget committee. The tax hike passed anyway—and California’s share of the nation’s million-dollar earners actually grew, reaching 18 percent in 2021. (Californians make up just less than 12 percent of the overall population.) And yet, when California recently considered a proposal to impose a wealth tax on mega-rich households, even some Democrats echoed the same old worry.
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Members of the media rely on ITEP for analysis and insight about how tax policies affect people. If you’re a reporter looking to talk to one of our experts, contact Jon Whiten at [email protected].
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media mention April 15, 2024 The Atlantic: The Myth of the Mobile Millionaire
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media mention April 15, 2024 Yahoo Finance: US Cities’ Mansion Taxes See Mixed Results
When Los Angeles voters approved an extra tax last year on home sales over $5 million, officials projected annual revenue of $700 million to help alleviate the city’s rampant homelessness crisis.
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media mention April 15, 2024 The American Prospect: The $6 Trillion Decision
Enormous amounts of presidential election messaging and coverage will unfurl between now and November 5. You will surely hear a lot about abortion, immigration, and inflation. You will hear about a fight for the future of American democracy. Even more likely, you’ll hear about polls, strategies to attract working-class and minority voters, or what one candidate said or tweeted or posted, or designated a surrogate to say or tweet or post. Oh, and court cases. Lots and lots of court cases. What you might not hear as much about are the stakes of the election’s outcome for all the money in the country. On Tax Day, of all days, it seems like a good time to lay that out.
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media mention April 15, 2024 The Lever: Pfizer’s Massive Tax Dodge
While jacking up drug prices, Pfizer recently reported more than $27 billion in revenue from its U.S. sales in 2023. But the Big Pharma titan owes nothing in federal income taxes, despite being one of the most profitable pharmaceutical companies in the world. That’s largely thanks to existing loopholes and a 2017 tax law signed by former President Donald Trump.
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media mention April 11, 2024 Mother Jones: America’s 806 Billionaires Are Now Richer Than Half the Population Combined—a Lot Richer
Are you better off now than you were when Donald Trump was president? That’s a dumb question for Republicans to pose, because the answer by most measures would be, “Oh, heck… -
media mention April 8, 2024 Money: These States Are Using Their Budget Surpluses to Give Tax Breaks to Residents
The most impactful changes in state taxes this year have come in the form of new or expanded tax credits targeted at families with children, according to Aidan Davis, state policy director at the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), a nonprofit, nonpartisan tax policy organization. “The first really incredible — and, I would say, positive — trend was that 18 states created or enhanced child tax credits or income tax credits in their states,” Davis says. Three of those states (Minnesota, Oregon and Utah) launched brand-new child tax credits, she says, with the remainder altering, and usually improving, existing credits.
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media mention April 3, 2024 Associated Press: Lawmakers in GOP-Led Nebraska Advance Bill To Raise Sales Tax
LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — With no votes to spare, Nebraska lawmakers advanced a bill that would raise the state’s sales tax by 1 cent to 6.5% on every taxable dollar spent — which would make it among the highest in the country.
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media mention April 3, 2024 Capital & Main: Extreme Wealth Is on the Ballot This Year — Will Americans Vote to Tax the Rich?
On March 7, President Joe Biden reintroduced proposals to increase taxes on the wealthiest Americans and the nation’s most profitable corporations. The move virtually ensures that the nation’s extreme wealth inequality — more than one in four dollars in the country is held by a tiny sliver of households with a net worth over $30 million — will be part of the national election debate. But excessive wealth may take center stage in at least 10 states, ranging from Democratic bastions such as California, Hawaii and New York to swing states such as Nevada and Pennsylvania.
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media mention March 13, 2024 The Nation: Biden Should Channel His Inner FDR and Soak the Rich
There’s no risk and everything to gain politically. According to a Navigator Research poll from last month, 79 percent of registered voters favor higher taxes on billionaires and corporations. Only 16 percent are opposed. Democrats favor wealth taxes on billionaires by a 94-2 margin, independents by a 78-15 margin, Republicans by a 63-30 margin.
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media mention March 12, 2024 Sacramento Bee: California Families Could Save Thousands of Dollars From Proposed Child Tax Break. Here’s Why
President Joe Biden’s child tax credit plan would benefit millions of California parents, saving eligible families an average of $2,980, according to data from Washington’s Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
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media mention March 12, 2024 Newsweek: What a Second Trump Term Means for Taxes
A second Donald Trump presidency would likely see another round of tax cuts targeted at the wealthy, similar to his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, according to a prominent taxation expert and lawyer.
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media mention March 11, 2024 USA Today: What President Joe Biden Got Wrong (and Right)
Though President Joe Biden largely stuck to the facts during his third State of the Union address Thursday, on several occasions he overstated the truth, left out key context or was simply wrong.
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media mention March 7, 2024 Washington Post: Biden: Ban Deductions for Firms Paying Executives More Than $1 Million
President Biden will call for blocking corporations from deducting the costs of paying salaries over $1 million from their federal taxes in Thursday night’s State of the Union address, part of populist-oriented… -
media mention March 6, 2024 Yahoo Finance: Trump-Era Corporate Tax Cuts Boosted Investment, but Did Not Pay for Themselves
The corporate tax cuts included in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act helped boost business investment while delivering a small increase in worker pay, according to a new analysis published by the Bureau of Economic Research. The tax cuts did not, however, come anywhere close to paying for themselves, as their Republican proponents in Congress and the Trump administration insisted they would, and instead are costing the federal government more than $100 billion per year in lost revenues.
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media mention March 4, 2024 Route Fifty: States Move to Cut Grocery Taxes
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt on Tuesday signed a bill to eliminate the state’s sales tax on groceries. With the 4.5% tax gone, that leaves 11 states that impose a grocery tax—a number that is swiftly shrinking. Stitt called it the largest single-year tax cut in state history. Oklahoma will see more than $415 million less in revenue a year.
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media mention March 4, 2024 Deseret News: The Utah Legislature Approved Another Tax Cut. Here’s What Taxpayers Need to Know
Utah lawmakers dropped the state’s income tax rate again this year. The reduction in the individual and corporate state income tax rate from 4.65% to 4.55% adds up to nearly $170 million, slightly more than the amount set aside in December for an unspecified tax cut by the powerful Executive Appropriations Committee made up of legislative leadership. The higher price tag is due to updated revenue forecasts showing an anticipated increase in income tax collections and the Legislature’s longtime Republican supermajority left little doubt they intended to continue to lower the state income tax rate. A tax cut was announced as a top GOP priority even before the session began in mid-January.
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media mention March 4, 2024 The Guardian: Private Equity Prepares for a Boon From Congress
Some of largest and most profitable companies in the US are primed to save billions of dollars from a congressional tax deal that critics say gives “billions in tax credits to the biggest corporations while giving pennies to middle-class children and families”. And private equity funds could be among the deal’s biggest beneficiaries, a Guardian analysis suggests. The tax cuts passed the House of Representatives at the end of January as part of an agreement that pairs handouts for businesses with a moderate expansion of the child tax credit. The Senate could vote on the bill over the coming weeks, and the White House has indicated that Joe Biden would sign it into law.
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media mention March 4, 2024 Newsweek: Income Tax Ban Could Be Reality for Millions
Supporters of a Washington resident-backed initiative trying to officially eliminate personal income taxes in the state got their first hearing before the legislature on Tuesday. Washington residents haven’t paid personal income taxes in almost a century thanks to a 1933 decision by the state Supreme Court, but those backing Initiative 2111 want to make sure that things stay that way, cementing the existing practice into law. I-2111 would prohibit state, counties, cities, and other local jurisdictions from imposing or collecting income taxes.
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media mention March 4, 2024 HuffPost: America’s Largest Companies Dodged Nearly $300 Billion In Taxes, Report Finds
The country’s largest companies dodged more than $275 billion in federal corporate income taxes from 2018 to 2022, a new report from the nonprofit Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy finds. The report examined corporate income taxes paid by 342 of the country’s largest companies from 2018 to 2022, the latest year for which companies have reported their earnings. All of them were profitable in all five years covered by the report.
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media mention March 4, 2024 The Guardian: Trump Gave Top US Firms Staggering Tax Cuts, With Some Paying $0 or less – Report
Some of the US’s most profitable corporations, including General Motors, Citigroup and Netflix, have slashed their tax bills in the years since the passage of the Trump tax cuts, with nearly a quarter paying rates in the single digits and 23 paying nothing, a report has found. The 2017 law cut the top corporate income tax rate from 35% to 21%. But the new assessment of corporate tax avoidance, published on Thursday by the non-profit Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (Itep), found that during the first five years the law was in effect, many profitable public companies in the US paid a far lower rate in practice.
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media mention March 4, 2024 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: PNC Bank, PPG Industries Among Companies Paying Less Than the Federal Tax Rate
WASHINGTON — More than a dozen Pennsylvania companies — including a handful in the Pittsburgh area — paid less than the 21% federal corporate income tax rate from 2018 to 2022, according to a study released Thursday by a progressive research group.
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media mention February 28, 2024 NPR: A Tech Billionaire Is Quietly Buying Up Land in Hawaii. No One Knows Why
Over the last couple of years, a mystery has been brewing in this small mountain town. Someone has been quietly buying hundreds of acres of land — stirring worries about rising housing prices and speculation among locals about what exactly is going on.
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media mention February 26, 2024 Mother Jones: It’s No Secret Our Tax System Punishes Low-Income People. It Doesn’t Have To
Oregon taxpayers will become some of the first in the nation to have the option to self-identify their race and ethnicity when they file their tax returns this year. The reason is both simple and complex: Especially at the state level, taxes worsen America’s yawning wealth gaps rather than easing them. A growing number of advocates and policymakers are trying to do something about that.
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media mention February 21, 2024 The Hill: Trump Tax Cuts on the Line in 2024 Election
The 2017 Trump tax cuts are on the line in the election this year, with Republicans hoping a sweep of Congress and the White House will allow them to extend the former president’s signature law. Democrats opposed the law when Trump was in power but have supported extending certain cuts, such as the decreased tax rates for people making less than $400,000 a year. Democrats do not want a blanket extension, which would cost nearly $4 trillion over the next decade.
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media mention February 20, 2024 Audio: ITEP’s Carl Davis Talks to Ohio Newsroom About That State’s Upside-Down Tax Code
Ohio’s poorest residents pay a greater percentage of their income to state and local taxes than the richest Ohioans, according to a recent report from the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. It found that Ohio has the 15th most unequal tax system in the country.