Local taxes are key to thriving communities. One in seven tax dollars in the U.S.—about $886 billion annually—is levied by local governments in support of education, infrastructure, public health, and other priorities. Three fourths of this funding comes from property taxes, 18 percent comes from sales and excise taxes, and six percent comes from income taxes.
Policy Briefs
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brief December 5, 2024 How Local Governments Raise Revenue — and What it Means for Tax Equity
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brief September 12, 2024 State Earned Income Tax Credits Support Families and Workers in 2024
Nearly two-thirds of states (31 plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico) have an Earned Income Tax Credit. These credits boost low-paid workers’ incomes and offset some of the taxes they pay, helping lower-income families achieve greater economic security.
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brief September 12, 2024 State Child Tax Credits Boosted Financial Security for Families and Children in 2024
Fifteen states plus the District of Columbia provide Child Tax Credits to reduce poverty, boost economic security, and invest in children. This year alone, lawmakers in three states – Colorado, New York, and Utah – expanded their Child Tax Credits while lawmakers in the District of Columbia created a new credit that will take effect in 2025.
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brief August 6, 2024 Sales Tax Holidays Miss the Mark When it Comes to Effective Sales Tax Reform
Nineteen states have sales tax holidays on the books in 2024. These suspensions combined will cost states and localities over $1.3 billion in lost revenue this year. Sales tax holidays are poorly targeted and too temporary to meaningfully change the regressive nature of a state’s tax system.
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brief April 16, 2024 Is California Really a High-Tax State?
Key Findings For families of modest means, California is not a high-tax state. California taxes are close to the national average for families in the bottom 80 percent of the… -
brief March 14, 2024 Local Mansion Taxes: Building Stronger Communities with Progressive Taxes on High-Value Real Estate
More than one dozen cities and counties levy progressive taxes on high-price real estate transactions — sometimes called mansion taxes — and over a dozen more are considering such policies. By asking buyers and sellers with greater financial means to contribute more to the common good, these policies are equipping communities with resources to make progress on critical challenges of local and national concern.
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brief February 2, 2024 House SALT Proposal is Expensive, Unneeded, and Poorly Designed
The SALT Marriage Penalty Elimination Act passed by the House Rules Committee on February 1 is costly, decreasing tax revenue by about $8 billion in 2023.
It also mostly only helps taxpayers who are already well off. -
brief February 2, 2024 Impacts of the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act
The Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act passed by the House of Representatives on January 31 is a compromise between lawmakers who want to address child poverty and… -
brief January 16, 2024 Proposed Tax Deal Would Help Millions of Kids with Child Tax Credit Expansion While Extending Damaging Corporate Tax Breaks
On January 16, Congressional tax writers officially announced the details of a tax policy agreement. The deal includes expansions of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) to improve access for low-… -
brief November 7, 2023 Far From Radical: State Corporate Income Taxes Already Often Look Beyond the Water’s Edge
State lawmakers are increasingly interested in reforming their corporate tax bases to start from a comprehensive measure of worldwide profit. This provides a more accurate, and less gameable, starting point for calculating profits subject to state corporate tax. Mandating this kind of filing system, known as worldwide combined reporting (WWCR), would be transformative, as it would all but eliminate state corporate tax avoidance done through the artificial shifting of profits into low-tax countries.
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brief November 2, 2023 America Used to Have a Wealth Tax: The Forgotten History of the General Property Tax
Over time, broad wealth taxes were whittled away to become the narrower property taxes we have today. These selective wealth taxes apply to the kinds of wealth that make up a large share of middle-class families’ net worth (like homes and cars), but usually exempt most of the net worth of the wealthy (like business equity, bonds, and pooled investment funds).The rationale for this pared-back approach to wealth taxation has grown weaker in recent decades as inequality has worsened, the share of wealth held outside of real estate has increased, and the tools needed to administer a broad wealth tax have improved.
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brief September 12, 2023 States are Boosting Economic Security with Child Tax Credits in 2023
Fourteen states now provide Child Tax Credits to reduce poverty, boost economic security, and invest in children. This year alone, lawmakers in three states created new Child Tax Credits while lawmakers in seven states expanded existing credits. To maximize impact, lawmakers should consider making their credits fully refundable, not including an earnings requirement, setting a maximum amount per child instead of per household, setting state-specific phase-out ranges that target low- and middle-income families, indexing to inflation, and offering the option of advanced payments.
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brief September 12, 2023 Boosting Incomes, Improving Equity: State Earned Income Tax Credits in 2023
Nearly two-thirds of states (31 plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico) have an Earned Income Tax Credit, an effective tool that boosts low-paid workers’ incomes and helps lower-income families achieve greater economic security. This year, 12 states expanded and improved EITCs.
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brief August 7, 2023 Weakening the SALT Cap Would Make House Tax Package More Expensive and More Tilted in Favor of the Wealthiest
The three tax bills that cleared the House Ways and Means Committee in June are reportedly stalled due to some House Republicans’ demands that the package include provisions weakening the $10,000 cap on deductions for state and local taxes (SALT). Modifying the House tax package in this way would make it much more expensive while benefiting the richest fifth of taxpayers almost exclusively.
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brief August 2, 2023 Sales Tax Holidays: An Ineffective Alternative to Real Sales Tax Reform
Nineteen states have sales tax holidays on the books in 2023, and these suspensions will cost nearly $1.6 billion in lost revenue this year. Sales tax holidays are poorly targeted and too temporary to meaningfully change the regressive nature of a state’s tax system. Overall, the benefits of sales tax holidays are minimal while their downsides are significant.
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brief June 13, 2023 Expanding the Child Tax Credit Would Help Nearly 60 Million Kids, Especially Those in Families with Low Incomes
Restoring the federal Child Tax Credit to 2021 levels would benefit nearly 60 million children. Three-quarters of the benefit would go to families in the bottom three quintiles, consisting of households with less than $86,600 in income.
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brief June 11, 2023 Trio of GOP Tax Bills Would Expand Corporate Tax Breaks While Doing Little for Americans Who Most Need Help
The trio of tax bills that cleared the House Ways and Means Committee in June include tax cuts that would mostly benefit the richest one percent of Americans and foreign investors.
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brief March 30, 2023 How Local Governments Raise Revenue—and What it Means for Tax Equity
Most local tax systems are falling short of their potential. Well-structured local tax policies support communities by facilitating important investments and advancing fairness, but the tax revenue sources most utilized by local governments tend to disproportionately weigh on households with fewer resources. Learning from these realities can inform the path to improved tax policies and stronger communities.
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brief March 3, 2023 Tax Avoidance Continues to Fuel School Privatization Efforts
Wealthy families are overwhelmingly the ones using school voucher tax credits to opt out of paying for public education and other public services and to redirect their tax dollars to private and religious institutions instead. Most of these credits are being claimed by families with incomes over $200,000.
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brief February 13, 2023 Higher Stock Buyback Tax Would Raise Billions by Tightening Loophole for the Wealthy
A higher excise tax rate on buybacks is completely reasonable. Quadrupling the rate, as the President proposes, would raise more revenue and cut into the tax advantage buybacks have over dividends. When a company uses their cash holdings to repurchase their own stock, it is an admission that they have few productive investment opportunities. The public does have productive uses for the tax revenue like infrastructure and schools that create value for the entire economy.
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brief January 17, 2023 The Pitfalls of Flat Income Taxes
Flat taxes have some surface appeal but come with significant disadvantages. Critically, a flat tax guarantees that wealthy families’ total state and local tax bill will be a lower share of their income than that paid by families of more modest means.
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brief November 10, 2022 Twenty-Three Corporations Saved $50 Billion So Far Under Trump Tax Law’s “Bonus Depreciation” that Many Lawmakers Want to Extend
Nearly two dozen of America’s largest corporations together received roughly $50 billion in tax breaks from 2018 through 2021 under a Trump tax law provision that many lawmakers now want to extend. Corporate lobbyists are even asking Congress to extend this “accelerated depreciation” tax break as part of a possible year-end tax bill.
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brief September 20, 2022 How the Inflation Reduction Act’s Tax Reforms Can Help Close the Racial Wealth Gap
Lawmakers have many opportunities to pass reforms that will make our tax code fairer and further reduce racial inequity in our economy. The Inflation Reduction Act is a great step forward; better taxing wealth and income from wealth and expanding targeted refundable tax credits would build on this progress.
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brief September 15, 2022 Boosting Incomes and Improving Tax Equity with State Earned Income Tax Credits in 2022
States continued their recent trend of advancing EITCs in 2022, with nine states plus the District of Columbia either creating or improving their credits. Utah enacted a 15 percent nonrefundable EITC, while the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Vermont and Virginia expanded existing credits. Meanwhile, Connecticut, New York and Oregon provided one-time boosts to their EITC-eligible populations.
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brief September 15, 2022 More States are Boosting Economic Security with Child Tax Credits in 2022
After years of being limited in reach, there is increasing momentum at the state level to adopt and expand Child Tax Credits. Today ten states are lifting the household incomes of families with children through yearly multi-million-dollar investments in the form of targeted, and usually refundable, CTCs.