Georgia

State governments provide a wide array of tax breaks for their elderly residents. Almost every state levying an income tax now sensibly allows some form of income tax exemption or credit for its over-65 citizens that is unavailable to non-elderly taxpayers. But many states have enacted poorly-targeted, unnecessarily expensive elderly income tax breaks that make state tax systems less sustainable and less fair. This policy brief surveys approaches to elderly income tax relief and suggests options for reforming state tax breaks for seniors.

In 2011, thirty one states and the District of Columbia allow a group of income tax breaks known as "itemized deductions." Itemized deductions are designed to help defray a wide variety of personal expenditures that affect a taxpayer's ability to pay taxes, including charitable contributions, extraordinary medical expenses, mortgage interest payments and state and local taxes. But, these deductions cost states billions of dollars a year while providing little or no benefit to the middle- and low-income families hit hardest by the current economic downturn. This policy brief explains itemized deductions and explores options for reforming these upside down tax…

Retail trade has been transformed by the emergence of the Internet. As the popularity of "e-commerce" (that is, transactions conducted over the Internet) has grown, policymakers have engaged in a heated debate over how state sales taxes should be applied to these transactions. This debate is of critical importance for state lawmakers because sales taxes comprise close to a third of all state tax revenues.

In the 2010 legislative session, Georgia lawmakers have ratified, or are poised to ratify, a set of tax changes which would dramatically reshape the fairness of the state’s tax system. A new ITEP analysis shows that these changes would increase the taxes paid by the poorest ninety five percent of Georgians, while cutting taxes for […]

Earlier this week, the tax writing committee in the Georgia House of Representatives quietly approved a bill, HB 1219, that would increase Georgia taxes by about $20 million a year by paring back a tax credit that only affects the very poorest Georgians. The bill’s proponents have repeatedly implied that the beneficiaries of the existing […]

On Friday, April 3, the Georgia General Assembly passed a budget for fiscal year 2010 that includes a major new tax cut (an exclusion for long-term capital gains income) and a substantial tax increase (eliminating a state-funded property tax relief program). A new analysis by the Washington, DC-based Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) […]