
July 17, 2024 • By Emma Sifre, Marco Guzman
Undocumented immigrants who work and pay taxes but don't have a valid Social Security number for either themselves or their children are excluded from federal EITC and CTC benefits. Fortunately, several states have stepped in to ensure undocumented immigrants are not left behind by the gaps in the federal EITC and CTC. State lawmakers should continue to ensure that immigrants who are otherwise eligible for these tax credits receive them.
While Massachusetts legislators recently dropped a real estate transfer tax from their major housing bill, the District of Columbia council sent a budget to the mayor that includes a mansion tax that would increase the tax rate on properties valued over $2.5 million. Meanwhile, lawmakers in New Jersey and South Carolina continue to, respectively, raise and reduce needed revenues.
June 26, 2024 • By Carl Davis, Erika Frankel
The report was produced in partnership with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and co-authored by CBPP’s Deputy Director of State Policy Research Samantha Waxman.[1] Click here to use our State Mansion Tax Estimator A historically large share of the nation’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, a reality glaring in […]
May 31, 2024
Gov. Polis of Colorado signed the bill expanding its Child Tax Credit, which cites ITEP’s research on the second page of the bill text. Read the bill and its status.
May 22, 2024 • By ITEP Staff
State legislatures are wrapping up, but don’t stray too far from your state capital or you’ll miss out on the action...
Uncertainty abounds in state tax debates lately...
This week, special sessions with major tax implications are in the air...
This week, many states took steps toward enacting tax cuts...
Many state legislative sessions are wrapping up...
April 11, 2024 • By ITEP Staff
State and local tax codes can do a lot to reduce inequality. But they add to the nation’s growing income inequality problem when they capture a greater share of income from low- or moderate-income taxpayers. These regressive tax codes also result in higher tax rates on communities of color, further worsening racial income and wealth divides.
Governors and legislative leaders in a dozen states have made calls to fully eliminate their taxes on personal or corporate income, after many states already deeply slashed them over the past few years. The public deserves to know the true impact of these plans, which would inevitably result in an outsized windfall to states’ richest taxpayers, more power in the hands of wealthy households and corporations, extreme cuts to basic public services, and more deeply inequitable state tax codes.
March 4, 2024
Below is written testimony delivered by ITEP Local Policy Director Kamolika Das before the Pennsylvania House Finance Subcommittee on Tax Modernization & Reform on March 1, 2024. Good afternoon and thank you for this opportunity to testify. My name is Kamolika Das, I live in South Philly, and I’m the Local Tax Policy Director at […]
March 4, 2024
Because property taxes are based upon property values, they are not as strongly connected to an ability to pay as the income tax. This can be particularly burdensome when income changes as a result of job loss, divorce, illness, or retirement. As a result, property taxes tend to be regressive.
January 23, 2024 • By ITEP Staff
Updated July 15, 2024 In 2024, state lawmakers have a choice: advance tax policy that improves equity and helps communities thrive, or push tax policies that disproportionately benefit the wealthy, drain funding for critical public services, and make it harder for low-income and working families to get ahead. Despite worsening state fiscal conditions, we expect […]
Tax policy themes have begun to crop up in states as governors give their yearly addresses and legislators lay out their plans for the 2024 legislative season...
January 8, 2024 • By ITEP Staff
Colorado Download PDF All figures and charts show 2024 tax law in Colorado, presented at 2023 income levels. Senior taxpayers are excluded for reasons detailed in the methodology. Our analysis includes nearly all (99.2 percent) state and local tax revenue collected in Colorado. These figures depict Colorado’s EITC at its 2024 level of 38 percent […]
Though Turkey Day has passed, lawmakers in states across the U.S. have yet to get their fill of delicious tax policy goodness...
November 21, 2023 • By Brakeyshia Samms
Race was front and center in a lot of state policy debates this year, from battles over what’s being taught in schools to disagreements over new voting laws. Less visible, but also extremely important, were the racial implications of tax policy changes. What states accomplished this year – both good and bad – will acutely affect people and families of color.
States differ dramatically in how much they allow families to make choices about whether and when to have children and how much support they provide when families do. But there is a clear pattern: the states that compel childbirth spend less to help children once they are born.
November 8, 2023 • By ITEP Staff
Voters had the chance to impact tax policy across the country on election day, and some chose to enact common-sense reforms to raise revenue...
November 7, 2023 • By Carl Davis, Matthew Gardner
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.
October 30, 2023 • By Andrew Boardman, Galen Hendricks, Kamolika Das
Leading localities are using refundable EITCs to boost incomes and reduce taxes for workers and families with low and moderate incomes. These local credits build on the success of EITCs at the federal and state levels, reduce economic hardship and improve the fairness of the tax code.
October 26, 2023 • By ITEP Staff
November elections are creeping closer and closer and while that typically means a new batch of lawmakers are elected, it also means voters have another chance to help shape state and local tax policy...
October 24, 2023 • By Jon Whiten
Even in this slow year for candidate elections, the decisions that voters in states and cities make could strengthen or weaken revenue for needs in their communities and could change how taxes are distributed across the income spectrum. In the places where tax fairness is on the ballot, much is at stake.
September 12, 2023 • By Aidan Davis
The latest analysis from the U.S. Census Bureau provides an important reminder of the compelling link between public investments and families’ economic well-being. Policy decisions can drastically reduce poverty and improve family economic stability for low- and middle-income families alike, as today’s data release shows.