Kentucky Center for Economic Policy: New Report: Wealthiest Kentuckians Pay the Lowest Tax Rate and the Problem Is Worsening

The study, Who Pays? A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems in All 50 States, evaluates the major components of state and local tax systems – including personal and corporate income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes and other excise taxes – for their overall distributional impact across income groups. For example, Kentucky’s low income tax credit means that people in poverty do not pay state income taxes. However, because the state fails to provide refundable tax credits to offset sales, excise and property taxes paid by low-income people, and because the state has a flat as opposed to graduated income tax rate structure, the poorest 20 percent of Kentuckians pay an effective tax rate 1.42 times higher than that paid by the top 1 percent.

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