“Since 2012, when Republicans took full control of the legislature and governorship for the first time in modern history, they’ve been on a tax cutting rampage,” said Meg Wiehe, a North Carolina native and deputy director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. “The state will be about $3.6 billion shorter in revenue than it would have been otherwise, which is a pretty significant difference in a state with a general fund of just around $21 billion.”
Select Media Mentions
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 October 16, 2018 Truthout: North Carolina Ballot Initiative Would Enshrine Tax Cuts for the Rich
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media mention October 16, 2018 Pod Save the People: Flint: Lead & Beyond
DeRay, Brittany, Sam and Clint discuss the overlooked news, including the decline of U.S. prison populations, how American abortion policies affect women around the world, the death penalty, and who benefits from President Trump’s tax cuts. (Podcast)
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media mention October 15, 2018 Law360: State Tax Codes Can Help Mitigate Poverty
State lawmakers have a tremendous opportunity to combat poverty with smart tax policies that can improve the lives of millions. Specifically, refundable tax credits for low-income workers and their families can play a role in positioning the nation’s most vulnerable families for success. Tax credits are also a vital tool for mitigating the upside-down nature of most state and local tax systems, which take a greater share of income from low- and middle-income families than from wealthy families. They are also especially important at a time when many federal lawmakers are determined to dismantle the safety net creating even more barriers to opportunity.
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media mention October 13, 2018 Mother Jones: A New Study Shows White Families Getting Four-Fifths of Trump’s Tax Cut
“Households of color have less income and have less wealth than white households, in large part due to centuries of systemic racism,” says Meg Wiehe, ITEP’s deputy director and one of the report’s authors. “So inevitably a tax cut that’s so expensive and so tilted to the top is furthering not just income inequality—it’s also furthering racial inequity in income and in wealth.”
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media mention October 12, 2018 Orlando Sentinel: Commentary: Vote No On Amendment 5: Allows a Few to Thwart the Needs of Many
This amendment would lock in tax breaks and loopholes for the wealthy and large corporations, making our tax system even more unfair than it is now. The nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy reports that only one state ranks lower in terms of the fairness of its tax system. Floridians who make $17,000 pay nearly 13 percent of their income in state and local taxes, and those who make more than $489,000 pay less than 2 percent. Amendment 5 would permanently enshrine this discrimination in our Constitution.
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media mention October 12, 2018 PolitiFact: Do Trump Tariffs Cost More Than Affordable Care Act Taxes?
Matt Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, added that regardless of imports volume, we don’t know how they will get passed through by the companies paying them, either. And not everyone has to pay them — consumers could simply redirect their demand.
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media mention October 12, 2018 WBOC16: Incorporating in Delaware: The Perks and Pitfalls
Some critics of Delaware LLCs say until Delaware’s corporate code is adjusted, criminal activity will continue to exist in Delaware’s corporations. Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, authored a report entitled “Delaware: An Onshore Tax Haven.”
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media mention October 12, 2018 The Guardian: I’m Undocumented. It’s Time to Reveal What That Actually Means
Nationwide, the amount of taxes that the Internal Revenue Service collects from undocumented workers ranges from almost $2.2m in Montana, which has an estimated undocumented population of 4,000, to more than $3.1bn in California, which is home to more than 3 million undocumented immigrants. According to the non-partisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants nationwide pay an estimated 8% of their incomes in state and local taxes on average. To put that in perspective, the top 1% of taxpayers pay an average nationwide effective tax rate of just 5.4%.
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media mention October 11, 2018 TalkPoverty: North Carolina Legislators Want to Add Tax Breaks for the Rich to the State Constitution
“Since 2012, when Republicans took full control of the legislature and governorship for the first time in modern history, they’ve been on a tax cutting rampage,” said Meg Wiehe, a North Carolina native and deputy director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. “The state will be about $3.6 billion shorter in revenue than it would have been otherwise, which is a pretty significant difference in a state with a general fund of just around $21 billion.”
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media mention October 11, 2018 Law360: TCJA Increases Racial, Economic Tax Divides, Report Says
The recent federal tax overhaul disproportionately benefits white households over households of color, increasing the wealth gap not just along income lines but along racial lines as well, according to a…
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media mention October 11, 2018 New York Times: White Americans Gain the Most From Trump’s Tax Cuts, a Report Finds
The tax cuts that President Trump signed into law last year are disproportionately helping white Americans over African-Americans and Latinos, a disparity that reflects longstanding racial economic inequality in the United States and the choices that Republicans made in crafting the law.
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media mention October 5, 2018 NPR: It’s Been 25 Years Since The Federal Gas Tax Went Up
Yet over those 25 years, the cost of building and maintaining roads, bridges and transit has shot up, leaving the highway trust fund, which pays the federal portion of highway and transit projects, running on empty.
“The whole reason this tax exists is to keep our roads paved and to keep our bridges from falling down,” says Davis. “And to do that effectively, it needs to collect a sustainable amount of revenue over time to cover the cost of paving roads and maintaining bridges, and it can’t do that if it’s just not updated for decades at a time.”
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media mention October 4, 2018 Washington Post: How big developers like Trump benefit from web of tax breaks
[Real estate investors] can fall behind on their debts and still face fewer tax penalties for having the debt forgiven than other kinds of investors, according to Steve Wamhoff, director of federal tax policy at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Trump took advantage of that, Wamhoff says, when he couldn’t repay debts on his Atlantic City casinos in the 1990s and early 2000s.
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media mention October 3, 2018 Fiscal Times: What Trump’s Family Finances Tell Us About the Tax System
“The key takeaway,” said Alan Essig, director of the liberal Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, “is that the wealthy and powerful abide by a different set of rules than… -
media mention October 3, 2018 The New Yorker: The Trump Family’s Tax Dodging Is Symptomatic of a Larger Problem
This experience points to an enduring scandal that goes well beyond the Trumps. “The key takeaway from the New York Times article . . . is that the wealthy and powerful abide by… -
media mention October 2, 2018 The Post and Courier: Some Valuable Downtown Charleston Land Now Comes with Tax Breaks
“Even if the tax breaks drive some new investment into low-income areas, this does not guarantee that these investments will ultimately benefit low-income families within the opportunity zones,” said the… -
media mention October 1, 2018 Politico: Morning Tax
Today also marks 25 years since the last federal gas tax increase, which was raised to its current 18.3 cents per gallon in 1993. Plenty of people have talked about… -
media mention September 26, 2018 NJ.com: Murphy Pushes Plan to Save Property Tax Breaks
Only residents of New York, Connecticut, and California deduct more from federal taxes than New Jerseyans, according the progressive Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Most of the states hit… -
media mention September 25, 2018 Law360: Permanent Tax Cuts Favor Richest in All But Three States
The second round of tax cuts passed Thursday and Friday by the U.S. House of Representatives would overwhelmingly favor the richest Americans, except for those in three high-tax states, according… -
media mention September 21, 2018 Bloomberg BNA: Understanding the Post-Tax Cuts Buybacks Surge: A Primer
But Matt Gardner, a senior fellow at the liberal-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, said the anger over buybacks stems from the idea that, with the passage of the… -
media mention September 21, 2018 Chicago Magazine: Illinois Is a Few Elections Away From a Graduated Income Tax
Illinois has one of the most regressive tax systems in the nation — and politicians are taking notice. Under our system, the burden of taxation falls disproportionately on those least able to pay… -
media mention September 20, 2018 The Free Press: Think Tank Releases Blueprint to Fully Fund Education, Medicaid & Lower Property Taxes
Tax cuts passed by the Maine Legislature and Gov. Paul LePage over the past eight years will cost the state $864 million in revenue in the next biennium, according to an analysis by the Maine Center for Economic Policy and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. At the same time the state continues to ignore its legal obligations to fully fund education, Medicaid expansion and revenue sharing.
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media mention September 14, 2018 The Inquisitor: Amazon Proposal to Cage Warehouse Workers Criticized
“For states contemplating tax incentives for Amazon, the salient question is: what do you give a tax avoider who already has everything?,” Matthew Gardner, senior fellow at Institute on Taxation… -
media mention September 12, 2018 Politico Morning Tax: Let’s Talk SALT
Cuomo is far from the only Democratic governor or lawmaker to unload on the SALT cap as, essentially, a broadside against progressive states. But at least one liberal think tank… -
media mention September 11, 2018 The Washington Post: GOP Pushes for New $2 Trillion Round of Tax Cuts
Democrats said the GOP’s second round of tax cuts would punish the poor and the middle class, arguing that they will provide a pretext for later spending cuts to entitlement…