States
Kansas City Star: TheChat: Kansas Evaluates Impact of the Raucous 2015 Session
June 17, 2015
The fallout from the 2015 session continues. ▪ “It’s clearly a cautionary tale for other states to have in mind.” — Matthew Gardner, executive director of the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, on how Kansas’ experience with tax cuts, and their resulting budget problems, is discouraging other states from following suit. For example, […]
KCTV Kansas City: Kansas Governor Says Deficit Plan Is Not a Tax Increase
June 17, 2015
Brownback, his top aides and their legislative allies have argued repeatedly that cuts in income tax rates benefited all classes of taxpayers. The governor noted that one provision of this year’s tax legislation will exempt 388,000 low-income Kansans, starting in 2016. But a new analysis Tuesday from Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonpartisan […]
KSHB Kansas City: Social Service Agencies Worry About Potential Effects of Kansas Budget
June 17, 2015
According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the poorest 40 percent of Kansans will pay an average of $131 more in taxes because of the new budget. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the poorest 40 percent of Kansans will pay an average of $131 more in taxes because of […]
Local Progress: Progressive Policies for Raising Municipal Revenue
June 16, 2015
This report lays out a set of policy and political interventions that cities, regions, and states can make to increase municipal revenue and to make their collections more progressive. Cities have historically suffered enormous budget shortfalls and after the Great Recession, available funds depleted even more drastically. Read the full report here.
New York Times: Kansas Tax Cutting Model Tarnished by Sales Tax Increase
June 15, 2015
Matthew Gardner, executive director of the left-leaning, Washington-based Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy said Kansas’ experience makes it more difficult for other states to pursue aggressive income tax cuts. In South Carolina, Republican Gov. Nikki Haley couldn’t pass income tax cuts even after declaring, “We are not doing what Kansas did.” “It’s clearly a […]
Columbus Dispatch: Ohio’s Top Earners Benefit More From Senate’s Tax Plan Than House’s, Analysis Says
June 15, 2015
The report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy on behalf of liberal research group Policy Matters Ohio estimates that the lowest 40 percent of Ohio income earners would see an average tax increase of about $20, although that number would fluctuate depending on whether someone smokes. Read more
Star Tribune: Kansas Lawmakers Pass Plan to Boost Sales, Cigarette Taxes After Brownback’s Budget Warnings
June 15, 2015
“TOPEKA, Kan. — Republican legislators in Kansas narrowly approved tax increases Friday, responding to pleas from their leaders and a warning from GOP Gov. Sam Brownback’s aides about draconian spending cuts that could result if they didn’t erase a budget deficit. “Clearly, a move away from income taxes toward consumption makes an already unfair tax […]
Daily Record: Letter: State’s Tax Structure Hits the Poor the Hardest
June 15, 2015
Why did the recession have such a damaging effect on the state budget? Because, almost uniquely in the country, most of our state’s revenue comes from various kinds of sales tax. This causes real problems. The non-partisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy says Washington’s tax system is the most unfair in the entire country. […]
The Washington Post: How Kansas Keeps Making Life Harder for the Poor
June 15, 2015
Poor families in Kansas would pay even more in taxes under a bill the state House passed Friday. Matt Gardner, the executive director of the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy said the new legislation would “double down” on those changes. “A tax hike of this size is going to have a worrisome impact […]
Salon: Sam Brownback Guts Kansas Even More: This Is Life Under America’s Worst Republican Governor
June 12, 2015
Brownback’s well-paid tax consultant, the legendary economist Laffer, promised Kansans that the cuts would pay for themselves in supercharged economic growth. At the time, a report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy showed that Laffer had things backward: over the previous decade, economic output per person had grown significantly faster in the nine […]
Columbus Dispatch: Kasich Flirts With Steve Forbes’ Flat Tax
June 9, 2015
“If you ask its advocates why it’s a good idea, one of the first things they’ll say is it’s a simpler way to tax,” said Matt Gardner, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning nonprofit organization in Washington. “I think that’s largely an illusion. “Any move to a flat tax […]
The News-Herald: Amazon’s Ohio Sales Tax Collection Seen As Way To ‘Level Playing Field,’ Close Tax Loophole
June 9, 2015
Some states, however, have decided not to wait for the federal government to make the change. So far, 10 states have taken their own limited steps to expand the number of retailers that must collect sales taxes, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. New York was first, enacting legislation in 2008 requiring […]
Dayton Daily News: Kasich Flirts With Flat Tax
June 9, 2015
“If you ask its advocates why it’s a good idea, one of the first things they’ll say is it’s a simpler way to tax,” said Matt Gardner, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning non-profit organization in Washington. “I think that’s largely an illusion.” “Any move to a flat tax […]
Chicagoist: Addressing Property Taxes And Gentrification Along The 606
June 5, 2015
Most gentrification narratives go vaguely like this: hipsters come to a neighborhood and open up fancy businesses and build fancy stuff and the original residents get pushed out. But often there is little focus on how exactly the original residents get pushed out. Some policy institutes like The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy consider most property […]
Hutchinson News: Brownback’s Latest Tax Plan Appears To Be More Of Same
June 3, 2015
Brownback proposed the state eliminate income taxes for 388,000 poor residents and raise taxes for business owners. Sounds good. But the nonpartisan Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy found that the plan actually would raise taxes on the poorest 40 percent of Kansans. That’s because Brownback also proposes raising the sales tax to 6.65, from […]
WNPR: Hold On: Why Don’t Corporations in Connecticut Pay (More) Tax?
June 3, 2015
Matt Gardner is director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, and he explained it this way: “If you think it’s wrong for companies to be able to shift their profits freely from state to state, on paper, without actually moving employees, without actually moving production, then this reform is a no-brainer,” he told […]
Issues with Taxing Marijuana at the State Level
May 6, 2015 • By Carl Davis, Richard Phillips
Read as a PDF. Table of Contents Introduction Why Tax Marijuana? Designing a State Tax on Marijuana How Much Revenue Would Marijuana Legalization Generate for States Factors that Could Negatively Impact Marijuana Revenue Factors that Could Positively Impact Marijuana Revenue Conclusion Endnotes Charts and Text Boxes Current Approaches to Taxing Retail Marijuana Sales How Should […]
Undocumented Immigrants’ State & Local Tax Contributions (2015)
April 15, 2015 • By Matthew Gardner, Meg Wiehe
This report was updated February 2016 Read as a PDF. (Includes Full Appendix of State-by-State Data) Report Landing Page In the public debates over federal immigration reform, sufficient and accurate information about the tax contributions of undocumented immigrants is often lacking. The reality is the 11.4 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States pay billions […]
State Tax Preferences for Elderly Taxpayers
March 23, 2015 • By Meg Wiehe
State governments provide a wide array of tax breaks for their elderly residents. Almost every state that levies an income tax now allows some form of income tax exemption or credit for citizens over age 65 that is unavailable to non-elderly taxpayers. And most states provide special property tax breaks to the elderly. Unfortunately, too many of these breaks are poorly-targeted, unsustainable, and unfair. This policy brief surveys federal and state approaches to reducing taxes for older adults and suggests options for designing less costly and better targeted tax breaks for elderly taxpayers.
Most Americans Live in States with Variable-Rate Gas Taxes
February 16, 2015 • By ITEP Staff
The federal government and many states are seeing shortfalls in their transportation budgets in part because the gasoline taxes they use to generate those funds are poorly designed. Thirty-one states and the federal government levy "fixed-rate" gas taxes where the tax rate does not change even as the cost of infrastructure materials inevitably increases over time. The federal government's 18.4 cent gas tax, for example, has not increased in over 22 years. And twenty states have gone a decade or more without a gas tax increase.
How Long Has it Been Since Your State Raised Its Gas Tax?
February 10, 2015 • By Carl Davis
An updated version of this report has been published with data through July 1, 2017. Read the report in PDF form. Many states’ transportation budgets are in disarray, in part because they are trying to cover the rising cost of asphalt, machinery, and other construction materials with a gasoline tax rate that is rarely increased.1 […]
Who Pays? (Fourth Edition)
January 30, 2015 • By Carl Davis, Matthew Gardner, Meg Wiehe
Major tax overhauls are on the agenda in a record number of states, and “Who Pays?” documents in state-by-state detail the precise distribution of state income taxes, sales and excise taxes and property taxes paid by each income group as of January 2013. It is a critical baseline against which future proposals can be measured. […]
Forbes: Fairness and the Reality of State Tax Systems
September 30, 2014
The survey was then meshed with some of the good work done by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which has demonstrated the fact that state tax systems are decidedly regressive. Read more
Wall Street Cheat Sheet: 10 States with the Least Fair Tax System
September 30, 2014
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) estimates that the real relationship between income and state and local taxes is negative, the complete opposite of what Americans think is fair. In order to find the most and least fair tax systems in America, WalletHub analyzed and ranked the 50 states based on the fairness […]
Bloomberg BNA: Survey Says Higher Income Households Should Pay More
September 30, 2014
Using data from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), WalletHub then compared what Americans think is fair to the structure of state and local tax systems. ITEP estimates the total state and local tax burden of households at seven different points in the income distributions of each state (e.g., bottom 20 percent or […]
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