Georgia
State Rundown 1/5: New Year, Same Old Playbook
• By ITEP Staff
The new year often brings with it a reinvigorated commitment to new goals and a fresh perspective on how to accomplish them, but it seems like lawmakers in states around the country are giving up already...
State Rundown 12/15: Making Our State Tax Naughty or Nice List & Checking it Twice
• By ITEP Staff
As the holiday season kicks into full gear, we’re putting the finishing touches on our State Tax Naughty or Nice list, and it looks like some late entrants are making a good case to be included...
Alex Welch
• By ITEP Staff
Alex leads the organization's graphic design work and content creation for email, social media and website. Prior to joining ITEP, Alex served as the Digital & Media Manager for the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute.
State Rundown 10/13: Haven Sent Edition
• By ITEP Staff
The release of the ‘Pandora Papers’ showed once again that states and their tax systems play an important role in wealth inequality, and in this case, worsening it...
Georgia Budget and Policy Institute: How Georgia’s Tax Code Contributes to Racial and Economic Inequality
• By ITEP Staff
Today, state and local taxes consume a greater share of income earned by Georgians in poverty—who are more likely to be people of color—while the richest pay a far lower share of their income in taxes. As such, Georgians who are among the bottom 20 percent of income earners, those who make less than $20,000 […]
State Income Taxes and Racial Equity: Narrowing Racial Income and Wealth Gaps with State Personal Income Taxes
• By Carl Davis, Jessica Schieder, Marco Guzman
10 state personal income tax reforms that offer the most promising routes toward narrowing racial income and wealth gaps through the tax code.
Sales Tax Holidays: An Ineffective Alternative to Real Sales Tax Reform
• By Dylan Grundman O'Neill
Policymakers tout sales tax holidays as a way for families to save money while shopping for “essential” goods. On the surface, this sounds good. However, a two- to three-day sales tax holiday for selected items does nothing to reduce taxes for low- and moderate-income taxpayers during the other 362 days of the year. Sales taxes are inherently regressive. In the long run, sales tax holidays leave a regressive tax system unchanged, and the benefits of…
State Rundown 8/4: Tis the Season…for Unnecessary Sales Tax Holidays
• By ITEP Staff
It’s beginning to look a lot like that time of year again. That’s right, it’s sales tax holiday season and states across the country are doing their best to induce spending that would probably occur regardless...
State Rundown 5/20: You Learn Something New Every Tax Day
• By ITEP Staff
“Tax Day” was earlier this week but the debates, research, and advocacy that determine our taxes and how they are used take place every day of the year...
State Rundown 5/13: States Get Federal Aid and Guidance as Many Sessions Wind Down
• By ITEP Staff
We had our noses buried in new American Rescue Plan guidance...when we heard the refreshing news that Missouri leaders are on the verge of modernizing their tax code, not only by becoming the final state to apply sales taxes to online purchases, but also by enacting an Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)...Meanwhile, tax debates are also highly active in California, Colorado, Louisiana, Maine, and Nebraska. We also share some of our own reporting on recent…
State Rundown 5/6: April Showers Bring Weeds As Well As Flowers
• By ITEP Staff
This week’s state fiscal news brings a reminder that even though advocates for great economic and racial justice have won some major progressive victories recently, anti-tax zealots have been hard at work too. Lawmakers advanced or enacted troubling regressive tax cuts or shifts in Idaho, Kansas, and Montana, and are actively debating them in Iowa, […]
State Rundown 4/29: How You Like Them Washington Apples?
• By ITEP Staff
North Carolina lawmakers may have approved a massive tax subsidy giveaway to Apple, but we won’t let that news spoil our barrel this week. Nor will we be discouraged by Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont’s threats to upset the apple cart full of positive progressive tax reforms state lawmakers recently came together to approve...Why all the optimism? Because the apple of our eye this week is Washington State, where advocates and lawmakers succeeded in a decade-long…
State Rundown 4/7: Tax Justice Advocates Applaud New York Budget Deal
• By ITEP Staff
New York lawmakers stole the spotlight this week as they were able to agree on—and convince reluctant Gov. Andrew Cuomo to support—strong progressive tax increases on the highest-income households and corporations in the state to fund shared priorities like K-12 education and pandemic recovery efforts. Minnesota leaders are attempting a similar performance off Broadway with progressive reforms of their own, while Kansas legislators are getting poor reviews for cutting a number of taxes and worsening…
State Rundown 4/1: Most States Resisting Foolish Tax Cut Games That Tear Revenues Apart
• By ITEP Staff
Supporters of tax fairness and adequate funding for public needs are hoping West Virginia’s income tax elimination effort turns out to be a prank, but most states are not fooling around with such harmful policies this year. For example...
State Rundown 3/24: The Calm Before the Reform?
• By ITEP Staff
It was a relatively quiet week in state fiscal policy, likely partly due to states waiting for federal guidance on some of the details in the American Rescue Plan. As they await those details, lawmakers in Mississippi and West Virginia continue to wrangle over whether to recklessly eliminate their income taxes, while leaders in states including Connecticut and New York considered more productive and progressive reforms. And in the meantime, groundbreaking work on the intersection…
State Rundown 3/10: Federal Pandemic Aid Means States Can Focus on the Big Picture
• By ITEP Staff
State and local policymakers will be preoccupied for a short time with celebrating and deciphering the federal pandemic relief package approved today, but ultimately the federal aid should free them to focus on even bigger concerns such as tax codes that often fail to adequately fund core priorities even in good years and exacerbate the economic and racial inequities that this pandemic has laid bare.
State Rundown 3/4: Progressive Tax Proposals Steal the Show
• By ITEP Staff
Although lawmakers in some states continue to push for expensive and regressive tax cuts that would primarily benefit wealthy households, worsen economic and racial injustices, and undermine funding for key public services, this week’s state fiscal news is dominated by efforts to do the opposite. Leaders in the District of Columbia, Maine, Nebraska, New York, Washington, and Wyoming made recent headlines by advocating for policies that improve on upside-down tax codes and generate needed funding…
Georgia Budget & Policy Institute: Georgia Tax Breaks Don’t Deliver
• By ITEP Staff
In addition to eroding the corporate income tax base and harming the state budget, in many cases, the state’s tax credit programs represent the transfer of Georgia taxpayer dollars to large out-of-state corporations and top income earners. Granting funds to corporations in this manner leaves less funding for schools, job training and health care programs […]
State Rundown 2/24: State Tax Debates Quickly Thaw Out with Warmer Weather
• By ITEP Staff
Warming temperatures in many parts of the country this week seem to be thawing out state fiscal debates as well. Multiple states including California, Colorado, Maryland, and New Jersey saw movement on efforts to improve tax credits for low- and middle-income families. Mississippi House lawmakers suddenly rushed through a dangerous bill to eliminate the state’s income tax and shift those taxes onto lower-income households. Montana senators also approved regressive income tax cuts and South Dakota…
It’s Been 10,000 Days Since the Federal Government Raised the Gas Tax
• By Carl Davis
10,000 days. More than 27 years. By next Tuesday that’s how long it will have been since the federal government last raised the gas tax. Over that time, vehicle fuel efficiency has improved by 25 percent and construction costs have grown 185 percent. And yet the federal gas tax has remained frozen at 18.3 cents per gallon, with its purchasing power shrinking by the day. The federal government has never gone this long without updating…
State Rundown 1/28: EITC Efforts a Welcome Contrast to State Tax Tug-of-War
• By ITEP Staff
Efforts to deliver and improve targeted tax credits to support low- and middle-income families proved to be unifying in Washington and Oregon, welcome developments in an otherwise divisive week in state tax debates. For example, Mississippi advocates hoping to end the state’s regressive grocery tax are up against a governor and many lawmakers pulling in the opposite direction by trying to eliminate its income tax. After Arizona residents approved an income tax increase to improve…
State Rundown 1/22: Somewhere Between a Flurry and a Blizzard of State Tax Activity So Far
• By ITEP Staff
You won’t find any images of Bernie Sanders and his mittens photoshopped into this week’s Rundown, but you will find the latest news on state fiscal debates, including proposals to generate needed funding by raising taxes on high-income households and profiting businesses in California, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, and Washington, as well as misguided efforts to slash taxes in Arizona, Iowa, South Carolina, Utah, and West Virginia. Also in the news are thoughtful improvements to targeted…
State Rundown 1/14: Bad Tax Cut Ideas Prove to Be Endemic
• By ITEP Staff
As states kick off their 2021 legislative sessions, it’s clear that many governors and lawmakers are attempting to “take a mulligan” on the last year and recycle tax-slashing ideas that were already bad in 2020 and are even worse now as states try to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic and accompanying downturn...On a brighter note, Illinois leaders showed they did learn from the events of 2020, passing a major criminal justice reform bill and payday…
New Leadership Should Seize Tax Justice Mandate; Cash Payments Offer On-ramp
• By Amy Hanauer
With the victory of Senators-elect Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Georgia, Democrats now control all three branches of government. New leaders should seize this moment to create a tax code that does much more to reduce inequality and to resource long-overdue investments in climate, health, education and other essentials. Most immediately, the historic election shifts power, making it easier to deliver on the promise to increase the recently enacted $600 cash payments to $2,000…
State Rundown 10/21: States Preparing Ingredients for 2021 Fiscal Debates
• By ITEP Staff
State lawmakers around the nation are already looking well past the upcoming election to the legislative debates they’ll be cooking up in 2021. In Iowa and Nebraska, anti-tax groups are thawing out regressive tax shift ideas they had put on ice earlier in the pandemic. In Delaware, a lawsuit and recent settlement have put educational and property tax inequities on the menu for the upcoming session. Meanwhile New Jersey and New York are both looking…
