Louisiana

This week, as Americans in every state celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day and reflected on his dream of peaceful protest and racial and economic justice, many eyes were on the teachers’ strike pressing for parts of this dream amid the “curvaceous slopes of California.” Governors and lawmakers in many states—including Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, South Carolina, and Wisconsin—discussed ways to raise pay for teachers and/or enhance education investments generally.

With many people enjoying time off over the next couple weeks, and the longest nights of the year coming over the weekend, now is a good time to get plenty of rest and relaxation in advance of what is likely to be a very busy 2019 for state fiscal policy and other debates. Among those debates, Kentucky lawmakers will be returning to topics they could not resolve in a brief special session held this week, New Jersey and New York will both be deciding how to legalize and tax cannabis, and gas tax updates will be on the agenda in…

State lawmakers are preparing their agendas for 2019 and looking at all sorts of tax and budget policies in the process, raising many familiar questions. Oregon legislators, for example, will try to fill in the blanks in a proposal to boost investments in education that left out detail on how to fund them, while their counterparts in Texas face the inverse problem of a proposed property tax cut that fails to clarify how schools could be protected from cuts. Similar school finance debates will play out in many other states. Alabama, Kansas, and Louisiana will look at gas tax updates,…

State policymakers, voters, and observers have been reflecting on this year’s campaigns and looking ahead to how the policy opportunities in their states have shifted as a result. For example, Arkansas’s governor sees a fresh chance to slash income taxes on the state’s wealthiest residents, while the governor-elect of Illinois will be doing just the opposite, launching into a promised effort to shore up the state’s budget by asking the wealthy to pay more. New York and Virginia residents may end up with buyers’ remorse after Amazon accepted their combined $2 billion tax subsidy offers for its HQ2 project. And…

ITEP views this proposal as a sensible improvement, and one that is actually overdue, to the way the charitable deduction is administered. At the end of my remarks I will discuss a few ways that the regulation could be improved. But the core point I want to emphasize is that the general approach taken here, where quid pro quo rules are applied in a broad-based fashion to all significant state and local tax credits, is the correct one.

Look out for potholes if you’re out trick-or-treating in Alabama tonight, where crumbling infrastructure figures to be a dominant debate in the coming legislative session. And be prepared to share the streets with disgruntled teachers if you‘re in Louisiana, where teachers are walking out to protest regressive tax policies that are sucking the lifeblood from the state’s schools. Meanwhile, Wisconsin residents are sharing scary stories of grotesquely large business tax subsidies and the “dark store” tax loophole they’ll be voting on next week. And you better expect the unexpected if you’re in Delaware, where Gov. John Carney shocked everyone by vetoing two broadly supported tax bills last week. 

LOUISIANA Read as PDF LOUISIANA STATE AND LOCAL TAXES Taxes as Share of Family Income Top 20% Income Group Lowest 20% Second 20% Middle 20% Fourth 20% Next 15% Next 4% Top 1% Income Range Less than $17,100 $17,100 to $32,500 $32,500 to $50,300 $50,300 to $91,500 $91,500 to $187,200 $187,200 to $473,000 over $473,000 […]

Voters all around the country are educating themselves for the upcoming elections, notably this week around ballot initiatives in Arizona and Colorado and competing gubernatorial tax proposals in Georgia and Illinois. But not all eyes are on the elections, as the relationship between state and local policy made news in Delaware, Idaho, North Dakota, and Ohio.

The IRS recently proposed a commonsense improvement to the federal charitable deduction. If finalized, the regulation would prevent not just the newest workarounds to the $10,000 deduction for state and local taxes (SALT), but also a longer-running tax shelter abused by wealthy donors to private K-12 school voucher programs. ITEP has submitted official comments outlining four key recommendations related to the proposed regulation.

A proposed IRS regulation would eliminate a tax shelter for private school donors in twelve states by making a commonsense improvement to the federal tax deduction for charitable gifts. For years, some affluent taxpayers who donate to private K-12 school voucher programs have managed to turn a profit by claiming state tax credits and federal tax deductions that, taken together, are worth more than the amount donated. This practice could soon come to an end under the IRS’s broader goal of ending misuse of the charitable deduction by people seeking to dodge the federal SALT deduction cap.

The $2 trillion 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) includes several provisions set to expire at the end of 2025. Now, GOP leaders have introduced a bill informally called “Tax Cuts 2.0” or “Tax Reform 2.0,” which would make the temporary provisions permanent. And they falsely claim that making these provisions permanent will benefit […]

Affordable housing efforts made news in Minnesota and Virginia this week, as tax breaks for homeowners and other victims of Hurricane Florence were made available in multiple states. Meanwhile, New Jersey is still looking into legalizing and taxing cannabis, and Wyoming continues to consider a corporate income tax. And gubernatorial candidates and ballot initiative efforts will give voters in many states much to consider in the November elections.

The national poverty rate declined by 0.4 percentage points to 12.3 percent in 2017. According to the U.S. Census, this was not a statistically significant change from the previous year. 39.7 million Americans, including 12.8 million children, lived in poverty in 2017. Median household income also increased for the third consecutive year, but this was […]

This report presents a comprehensive overview of anti-poverty tax policies, surveys tax policy decisions made in the states in 2018, and offers recommendations that every state should consider to help families rise out of poverty. States can jumpstart their anti-poverty efforts by enacting one or more of four proven and effective tax strategies to reduce the share of taxes paid by low- and moderate-income families: state Earned Income Tax Credits, property tax circuit breakers, targeted low-income credits, and child-related tax credits.

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is a policy designed to bolster the earnings of low-wage workers and offset some of the taxes they pay, providing the opportunity for struggling families to step up and out of poverty toward meaningful economic security. The federal EITC has kept millions of Americans out of poverty since its enactment in the mid-1970s. Over the past several decades, the effectiveness of the EITC has been magnified as many states have enacted and later expanded their own credits. The effectiveness of the EITC as an anti-poverty policy can be increased by expanding the credit at…

Although most state legislatures are out of session during the summer, the pursuit of better fiscal policy has no "off-season." Here at ITEP, we've been revamping the State Rundown to bring you your favorite summary of state budget and tax news in the new-and-improved format you see here. Meanwhile, leaders in Massachusetts and New Jersey have been hard at work in recent weeks and are already looking ahead their next round of budget and tax debates. Lawmakers in many states are using their summer break to prepare for next year's discussions over how to implement online sales tax legislation. And…

States’ need for revenue and increased investment in key public services is not unique to this legislative session. But the extent of disinvestment—particularly in education—has been a driving force behind policy discussion and state legislative action this year. In many cases ill-advised tax cuts coupled with persistent school funding cuts led states to this common fate, initiating a powerful and growing trend. Here’s how lawmakers in a handful of state responded: