Indiana
State Rundown 2/16: Spending Priorities Emerge as the Votes Are Counted
• By ITEP Staff
State lawmakers have been busy working out deals and negotiating how best to use excess revenues, and as the votes are beginning to come in, spending priorities are becoming clearer...
State Rundown 2/2: The First Tax Cut Domino Falls…
• By ITEP Staff
One-time payments have become a common theme around the country, as Idaho is one of roughly eleven states with plans to provide tax relief in a similar fashion...
State Rundown 1/26: States Offering Preview of Tax Themes and Trends for 2022
• By ITEP Staff
Governors and legislators are beginning to settle on and advance tax bills that could drastically shape the future of their states and several trends and themes are beginning to emerge...
The New Trend: Short-Sighted Tax Cuts for the Rich Will Not Grow State Economies
• By Neva Butkus
The same legislators who touted tax cuts for the rich as solution to our problems before the pandemic are also saying tax cuts for the rich are a solution during the pandemic. Tax cuts cannot be a solution to everything, especially at a time when the richest Americans are amassing more wealth than ever.
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...
Boosting Incomes and Improving Tax Equity with State Earned Income Tax Credits in 2021
• By Aidan Davis
The EITC benefits low-income people of all races and ethnicities. But it is particularly impactful in historically excluded Black and Hispanic communities where discrimination in the labor market, inequitable educational systems, and countless other inequities have relegated a disproportionate share of people to low-wage jobs.
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.
State Rundown 7/21: States Go for Tax Policy Gold This Olympics Season
• By ITEP Staff
It’s Olympics season! As countries around the globe battle for first place in a plethora of sports and contests it’s as good a time as any to look around America to see which states deserve a gold medal in the ‘Equitable Tax Policy’ event...
State-Level EITC Victories in 2021
• By Aidan Davis
A growing group of state lawmakers are recognizing the extent to which low- and middle-income Americans are struggling and the ways in which their state and local tax systems can do more to ensure the economic security of their residents over the long run. To that end, lawmakers across the country have made strides in enacting, increasing, or expanding tax credits that benefit low- and middle-income families. Here is a summary of those changes and…
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 4/21: Spring Has Sprung, or Has It?
• By ITEP Staff
Just as a recent cold snap reminded us that spring has not fully sprung yet, this week’s news has been full of reminders that state fiscal debates aren’t quite finished either...
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…
Comparing Flat-Rate Income Tax Options for Alaska
• By Carl Davis
Alaska lawmakers are facing an unprecedented fiscal crisis. The state is more dependent than any other on oil tax and royalty revenues but declines in oil prices and production levels have sapped much of the vitality of these revenue sources. One way of diversifying the state’s revenue stream and narrowing the yawning gap between state revenues and expenses would be to reinstitute a statewide personal income tax. Alaska previously levied such a tax until 1980.…
State Rundown 2/4: Some Lawmakers, Governors Rising to Occasion with Progressive Tax Proposals
• By ITEP Staff
States face shifting landscapes as they attempt to deal with both emergent and longstanding issues in their tax codes and budget structures. This is particularly evident in Oklahoma, where lawmakers must adjust to a U.S. Supreme Court decision that literally redraws state boundaries by recognizing the rights of indigenous communities, but is true in every state, and lawmakers in many of them are rising to the challenge. Read below and see our blog posted today…
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…
State Rundown 6/18: States Work to “Finalize” Budgets in Uncertain Times
• By ITEP Staff
Despite uncertainty all around the nation, a few states passed budgets this week and many more are negotiating to enact theirs before fiscal years close at the end of June. Colorado notably pared back some of its own tax breaks and limited the potential damage on its budget from new federal breaks. California also passed a budget but few in the state actually think the dealing is done. Iowa quietly enacted its budget too, though…
State Rundown 5/27: Some States Finally Talking Revenue Solutions to Revenue Crisis
• By ITEP Staff
This week the immense scale and uneven distribution of economic and health damage from the COVID-19 pandemic continued to come into focus, hand in hand with greater clarity around pandemic-related revenue losses threatening state and local revenues and the priorities—such as health care, education, and public safety—they fund. Officials in many states, including Ohio and Tennessee, nonetheless rushed to declare their unwillingness to be part of any solution that includes raising the tax contributions of…
State Rundown 4/22: Earth Day Lessons from Pangea to Pandemic
• By ITEP Staff
In different ways, Earth Day and the COVID-19 pandemic convey a similar lesson: people around the world face shared struggles and disparate impacts, which they must work together to overcome through both emergency action and systemic change. In keeping with that lesson, state fiscal policy news this week was strikingly similar around the country, as states take account of the major threat posed by the pandemic to their budgets and attempt to grapple with its…
It’s Time to Rethink Those Tax Cuts
• By Aidan Davis
The full effect of the coronavirus pandemic on state revenue streams remains largely unknown. One key policy option is to reevaluate recent misguided tax cuts—particularly those that have not yet taken full effect and will add to growing revenue shortfalls in the coming years.
State Options to Shore up Revenues and Improve Tax Codes amid Pandemic
• By Dylan Grundman O'Neill, Meg Wiehe
The COVID-19 pandemic is an extraordinarily challenging time, as we see harm and struggle affecting the vast majority of our families, businesses, public services, and economic sectors. No one will be unaffected by the crisis, and everyone has a stake in the recovery and faces tough decisions. In the world of state fiscal policy, where revenue shortfalls are likely to be far bigger than can be filled by the initial $150 billion in federal aid…
State Rundown 4/9: Pandemic’s Fiscal Effects Slowly Coming into Focus
• By ITEP Staff
The COVID-19 pandemic continued this week to wreak havoc on lives and communities around the world. The fiscal fallout of the virus in the states is growing as well, and beginning this week to come into sharper focus. This week’s Rundown brings together what we know of that slowly clarifying picture and how states are responding so far.
State Rundown 4/3: States Welcome Federal Aid, Seek Further Solutions
• By ITEP Staff
States and families got good news this week as Congress came together to pass major aid to help during the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. But that bright spot came amid an onslaught of very difficult news about the public health crisis and the economic and fiscal fallout accompanying it. This week’s Rundown brings you the latest on these developments and state and local responses to them.
ITEP Testimony Regarding Connecticut Senate Bill 16, An Act Concerning the Adult Use of Cannabis
• By Carl Davis
This testimony explains the advantages of the cannabis tax structure proposed in Connecticut’s Senate Bill 16 and offers additional background information as well as ideas for potential changes to the bill.
