News Releases

Long before the tax law passed, some states abused the idea of charitable giving to funnel public money to various activities, such as private K-12 education, by reimbursing up to 100 percent of their taxpayers’ donations with tax credits. The flimsy, hastily-written SALT deduction cap enacted last year made this type of gaming even easier than before, and it was entirely predictable that states would respond by enacting more tax credits of this type.

North Carolina lawmakers' misplaced priorities are evident: The recent rounds of tax cuts will provide the state’s millionaires with an average annual tax break of more than $45,000, which is nearly as much as the average teacher’s annual salary of about $50,000.

Following is a statement by Meg Wiehe, deputy director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, regarding the pending teachers’ strike in Arizona. “The Arizona teachers’ strike, like other recent strikes and walkouts before it, is as much a state fiscal policy story as it is an education story. Year after year, lawmakers in […]

Two recent Congressional Budget Office reports underscore why the nation needs progressive tax policies. The first, published in March, demonstrates that tax and other public policies have a measurable effect on income disparity. According to CBO data, tax policies (think Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit) and means-tested programs (Children’s Health Insurance Program, Medicaid, food assistance, etc.) have helped alleviate growing income inequality. The second CBO report, released this week, reveals that the national debt will soar to untenable levels in the coming years due in part to the recent Trump-GOP tax cuts.

While rhetoric may bill this tax law and proposed extension as a middle-class tax cut, the data tell the real story: the Trump-GOP tax law was and remains a giveaway to corporations and the wealthy.

This report concludes that lack of consistent sales tax collection is contributing to an unlevel playing field for local businesses “because millions of shoppers are able to pay less tax if they choose to buy from out-of-state companies over the Internet rather than at local stores.” It recommends that states explore reforms to bring their sales tax policies into the digital age.

“In case it was not apparent after the White House pushed for a tax plan that overwhelmingly benefits corporations and the rich, the White House budget proposal is clear on what and whom it prioritizes: wealth over work, corporate interest before the public good.”

The 2010 Citizens United decision shoved open already leaky floodgates that have allowed the well-heeled to dictate our nation’s electoral outcomes and public policies. Lawmakers have been clear that their ‘donors’ and ‘corporate CEOs’ are the driving force behind this tax overhaul, and they have been content to ignore opinion polling that indicates the public is against this legislation by a margin of 2-to-1.

Like the initial House and Senate tax bills, the final tax legislation reserves the greatest share of the benefit for the wealthy and foreign investors and would hike taxes for average taxpayers in the lowest-earning three-fifths of households.

Nearly 30 years ago, Trump was well connected enough that he was able to go to Congress and testify about how tax changes affected his business. Ordinary working people are rarely lucky enough to talk about their personal experiences in front of a congressional committee. So if they want to make their views known about the catastrophe of 2017, it will have to be in election of 2018.

What voters want—the people who put elected officials in office—matters. Members of Congress should take pause before proceeding with their profoundly unpopular tax bill that the vast majority of voters have said lawmakers should not pass.

But so far, Republican leaders have demonstrated that, for them, the only voices that matter in this debate are those that fund their campaigns.

Poorest 20 percent would receive the biggest tax hike A 50-state analysis of the tax plan that passed the Senate Finance Committee finds that the bottom 60 percent of households overall would face a tax hike in the later years of the plan, while the richest 1 percent, corporations, and foreign investors would continue to […]

For months, Speaker Paul Ryan has cited working people’s “economic anxiety” as a reason to push through tax reform. While the speaker has correctly diagnosed a defining social issue of our time, he and other Republican leaders continue to focus on a top-down remedy that will only make this problem worse.

There are a few things that have been clear since this tax bill’s inception. It was never a plan to help the middle class. Now, the legislation being considered before the Senate Finance Committee is no longer a tax bill. It is an ACA repeal bill.

A 50-state analysis of the Senate tax proposal finds that not only would greatest share of benefits go to the richest Americans, but also more than one in 10 taxpayers would face a tax hike, with a large number of those taxpayers residing in states where residents pay higher state and local taxes.

Following is a statement by Alan Essig, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, regarding the Senate tax plan released today. While it will take a complete analysis to determine how each income group is affected by the Senate’s proposal, an initial overview of the plan leads ITEP’s analysts to conclude that […]

A national and 50-state distributional analysis of the House tax plan released late last week reveals that not only would the wealthiest 1 percent receive the greatest share of the total tax cut in year one, but their share would grow over time due to phase-ins of tax cuts that mostly benefit the rich and the eventual elimination or erosion in value of provisions that benefit low- and middle-income taxpayers.

Following is a statement by Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, regarding the release of the “Paradise Papers,” a series of documents from Appleby, a leading offshore law firm. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists released the investigative report today.

Instead of engaging in thorough, public process that may have yielded real tax reform for middle-class families, lawmakers covertly put together a plan that reserves its biggest benefits for corporations and the wealthy while throwing in a few gimmicks for political cover.

Keeping the top tax rate at 39.6 percent for millionaires is a cosmetic change meant to make this tax plan more palatable. Unless tax writers take out other provisions that almost exclusively benefit the highest-income households, millionaires will still benefit most.

A comparative analysis of economic trends in the nine states that do not levy an income tax and the nine states that levy the highest top income tax rates found that the latter group performed significantly better on more than half a dozen measures of economic well-being, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy said […]

Passing a budget is supposed to provide a structure for our elected officials to responsibly manage our nation’s finances and public investments. But that is not the purpose of this budget resolution.

A 50-state analysis of the GOP tax framework reveals the top 1 percent of taxpayers would receive a substantial tax cut while middle- and upper-middle-income taxpayers in many states would pay more, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy said today. The GOP continues to tout its tax plan as “beneficial to the middle class.” […]

Economically, the rich are doing just fine, yet the GOP is brazenly selling old hat trickle-down economic theories laden with rhetoric about projected economic growth that will benefit working people. Worse, they are doing so even though opinion polling shows the majority of Americans do not want Congress to pass tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.