Select Media Mentions
Newark Star-Ledger: Murphy plea for federal aid blocked by McConnell as some in GOP don’t want to help blue states
July 22, 2020
Trump has championed a payroll tax cut, which would not help those currently without jobs under the pandemic-induced recession nor assist states in balancing their budgets. Almost two-thirds of the benefits of a payroll tax cut, 64%, would go to the richest 20% of Americans, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a […]
Business Insider: Trump is doubling down on a payroll tax cut which has slim GOP support and would do virtually nothing to help jobless Americans
July 20, 2020
A disproportionate share of the aid would go toward the wealthier segment of Americans. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that 65% of the benefits would be drawn by the richest 20% of taxpayers. Read more
Forbes: Is Trump Using Next Stimulus Package To Undermine Funding Of Social Security And Medicare?
July 20, 2020
In 2011, when President Obama and a Republican Congress compromised on a temporary 2 percent payroll tax holiday, the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), calculated that 48 percent of the benefits went to the richest 20 percent of taxpayers, which is problematic if you are trying to help low- and middle-income households. […]
Bloomberg: Virus Surge Hits Budgets of States Most Vulnerable to Shutdowns
July 17, 2020
As the two states have each surpassed nearly 600,000 confirmed cases combined, with daily new cases in the tens of thousands, governors in Florida and Texas are considering scaling back their economies amid enormous pressure. Their initial hesitancy to shut down may have fueled the recent surges according to some reports. Yet, experts say that […]
KPFA: Death and taxes! or, why the rich get richer
July 16, 2020
Why and how the wealth of the very rich has grown, while all other public and private wealth has shrunk during COVID 19. Detailed analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. With host Kris Welch.
Salon: “Stunningly Tone-Deaf”: Ivanka Trump Criticized for Urging Jobless Americans to “Find Something New”
July 14, 2020
Roughly two-thirds of the temporary payroll tax cut would flow to the richest 20% of Americans, while the poorest 40% would get only 6% of the benefit, according to the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy. Such tax breaks are “insufficiently targeted and largely meaningless to those who’ve lost their jobs and are no longer […]
The Epoch Times: Biden’s Progressive Tax Proposal Raises Rates on Wealthy and Corporations
July 14, 2020
“It’s probably one of the most progressive tax plans we’ve seen from a presidential nominee from one of the two major parties in many, many years,” Steve Wamhoff, director of federal tax policy at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy told the Epoch Times. Unlike Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Biden has not advocated for […]
Law 360: State And Local Tax Policy To Watch In The 2nd Half Of 2020
July 14, 2020
As states grapple with refilling their coffers in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, tax policy debates in the second half of 2020 could center on revisiting conformity to the federal code and a consideration of broad-based tax proposals. Additionally, some states are contemplating wading into untested legal waters by taxing digital advertising, while practitioners are […]
Urban Milwaukee: Labor Leaders Slam Trump for Betraying Working People
July 14, 2020
By Democratic Party of Wisconsin The tax law Trump pushed through was a boon for large corporations, including those in Wisconsin like Kimberly Clark, that used the handout to shutter their facilities, issue stock buybacks, and lay off workers instead of creating jobs and increasing wages. Read more
The Moneyist: ‘I’m Having a Hard Time Understanding How Earning Over $200K/year Is Too Much to Qualify for a Decent Stimulus Check’
July 14, 2020
According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the majority of state tax systems are regressive. “Those in the highest-income quintile pay a smaller share of all state and local taxes than their share of all income while the bottom 80% pay more. In other words, not only do the rich, on average, pay […]
Wall Street Journal Opinion: Payroll-Tax Cuts Mostly Go to the Well Off
July 9, 2020
Contrary to the authors’ claim, a payroll tax cut wouldn’t “disproportionately benefit” lower-income workers. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, nearly half of the benefit from a payroll-tax cut would go to the richest 20% of taxpayers, and would be a boon to big corporations that are under no obligation to rehire […]
Jacobin: The 1 Percent Are Cheating Us Out of a Quarter-Trillion Dollars in Taxes Every Year
July 9, 2020
On the international front, Trump’s 2017 tax cut bill included several provisions that “encourage American-based corporations to shift profits offshore,” according to the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy. The administration has also recently moved to roll back rules designed to crack down on so-called corporate inversions, whereby companies incorporate offshore in order to avoid […]
Yahoo Finance: This GOP Proposal May Slash Taxes for Big Tech: ITEP
July 9, 2020
Matthew Gardner, Senior Fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, joins Yahoo Finance’s Zack Guzman to discuss how a possible Republican tax credit proposal could provide new breaks to tax avoiders like Netflix and ITEP. Watch here (video)
MedPage Today: Tenet Gets Big Federal $$$ but Still Cuts Employees
July 9, 2020
Many companies, including Tenet, delayed paying their 2017 tax liabilities at the rate then (35%) to follow whatever the rate is when they decide to pay (21% for 2019), said Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow with the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. “That’s certainly an incentive created by the tax cut,” Gardner told MedPage […]
Gothamist: Undocumented Immigrants In Need Finally Get Promised Pandemic Cash Assistance
July 9, 2020
Most workers who lost their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic started receiving unemployment and federal stimulus checks in March and April. But undocumented immigrants don’t qualify, even though the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found more than half pay taxes (including over $1 billion in New York alone). U.S. citizens married to undocumented immigrants […]
Business Insider: Trump Wants Tax Breaks to Encourage People to Watch Sports Games and Travel Around the US. Here’s Why That Could Backfire as the Pandemic Rages.
July 8, 2020
The McSally proposal also drew fire from economists who argued it would mainly benefit wealthier taxpayers and not be well targeted. “Low and most middle-income families will receive no or minimal benefit as you can’t claim the maximum credit until you’re pretty well off,” Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Institute on Taxation […]
Financial Times: ‘It’s a Matter of Fairness’: Squeezing More Tax From Multinationals
July 8, 2020
Since the late 1980s, there has been a complete change in mindset, one pioneered and taken to its extreme by General Electric, America’s biggest manufacturer by market capitalisation for most of the past 40 years. Under the late Jack Welch, who ran the company from 1981 to 2001, a tiny corporate tax team was transformed […]
Nonprofit Quarterly: The $370 Billion Fiscal Cliff: Why State Budgets Need Our Attention
June 30, 2020
A 2018 study released by the nonprofit Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy finds that the poorest fifth spend on average 11.4 percent of their income on state and local taxes, compared to 7.4 percent for the top one percent. As Peter Sabonis wrote for NPQ this spring, particularly during times of crisis, we rely […]
Law 360: Biz Tax Credit Proposals Would Aid Wealthy, Report Says
June 30, 2020
Republican proposals to make business tax credits refundable to mitigate the economic downturn caused by the novel coronavirus pandemic would provide unnecessary tax breaks to high-income people, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy said in a report. Read more
POLITICO Morning Tax: Welcome, commissioner
June 30, 2020
FOOT OFF THE ACCELERATOR, PLEASE: The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy’s Matthew Gardner and Steve Wamhoff maintain in a new paper that the proposals to allow companies to cash out on their tax credits won’t just help businesses in desperate need of cash. Instead, they argue that companies like Amazon and Netflix, which are already […]
The Fiscal Times: A ‘Wacky’ Tax Credit Idea: $4,000 for Vacation
June 23, 2020
Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, says that the loose requirements in the bill mean “that any car owner with an ounce of creativity should be able to gin up an excuse for taking a tax credit for every tank of gas they’ve purchased in 2020.” That, says […]
The Dallas Morning News: DACA Texans Are Essential to our COVID-19 Response and Economic Future
June 22, 2020
In total, Texas is home to more than 107,000 DACA recipients, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Those DACA recipients pay $244.5 million annually in state and local taxes, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates. Read more
Sentinel & Enterprise: It’s Been a Year Without Equal
June 21, 2020
Instead, the last real action on the fiscal 2021 budget came in January when Baker rolled out a $44.6 billion spending plan that would have its underlying assumptions wiped away before lawmakers could try their hands at producing a budget of their own. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy this week said that “despite […]
CNN: This Is Who’s Affected by the Supreme Court Decision on DACA
June 18, 2020
According to a 2018 report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the young undocumented immigrants who are enrolled in DACA and those who would be eligible for the program if it were still accepting new applicants contribute about $1.7 billion in state and local taxes annually. That figure includes personal income, property, and […]
Crain’s New York Business: Legalizing Marijuana Can’t Cure Inequality, But It Will Ease Budget Crisis
June 14, 2020
My methodology is informed by the work of Carl Davis, research director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, who recently published a thoughtful blog post on per-capita cannabis excise tax collections. Davis found that last year more than $1.9 billion of tax revenue was collected across seven adult-use states (Alaska, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon, […]
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