Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy

Select Media Mentions

Urban Milwaukee: Labor Leaders Slam Trump for Betraying Working People

July 14, 2020

By Democratic Party of Wisconsin The tax law Trump pushed through was a boon for large corporations, including those in Wisconsin like Kimberly Clark, that used the handout to shutter their facilities, issue stock buybacks, and lay off workers instead of creating jobs and increasing wages. Read more

The Moneyist: ‘I’m Having a Hard Time Understanding How Earning Over $200K/year Is Too Much to Qualify for a Decent Stimulus Check’

July 14, 2020

According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the majority of state tax systems are regressive. “Those in the highest-income quintile pay a smaller share of all state and local taxes than their share of all income while the bottom 80% pay more. In other words, not only do the rich, on average, pay […]

Wall Street Journal Opinion: Payroll-Tax Cuts Mostly Go to the Well Off

July 9, 2020

Contrary to the authors’ claim, a payroll tax cut wouldn’t “disproportionately benefit” lower-income workers. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, nearly half of the benefit from a payroll-tax cut would go to the richest 20% of taxpayers, and would be a boon to big corporations that are under no obligation to rehire […]

Jacobin: The 1 Percent Are Cheating Us Out of a Quarter-Trillion Dollars in Taxes Every Year

July 9, 2020

On the international front, Trump’s 2017 tax cut bill included several provisions that “encourage American-based corporations to shift profits offshore,” according to the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy. The administration has also recently moved to roll back rules designed to crack down on so-called corporate inversions, whereby companies incorporate offshore in order to avoid […]

Yahoo Finance: This GOP Proposal May Slash Taxes for Big Tech: ITEP

July 9, 2020

Matthew Gardner, Senior Fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, joins Yahoo Finance’s Zack Guzman to discuss how a possible Republican tax credit proposal could provide new breaks to tax avoiders like Netflix and ITEP. Watch here (video)

MedPage Today: Tenet Gets Big Federal $$$ but Still Cuts Employees

July 9, 2020

Many companies, including Tenet, delayed paying their 2017 tax liabilities at the rate then (35%) to follow whatever the rate is when they decide to pay (21% for 2019), said Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow with the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. “That’s certainly an incentive created by the tax cut,” Gardner told MedPage […]

Gothamist: Undocumented Immigrants In Need Finally Get Promised Pandemic Cash Assistance

July 9, 2020

Most workers who lost their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic started receiving unemployment and federal stimulus checks in March and April. But undocumented immigrants don’t qualify, even though the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found more than half pay taxes (including over $1 billion in New York alone). U.S. citizens married to undocumented immigrants […]

Business Insider: Trump Wants Tax Breaks to Encourage People to Watch Sports Games and Travel Around the US. Here’s Why That Could Backfire as the Pandemic Rages.

July 8, 2020

The McSally proposal also drew fire from economists who argued it would mainly benefit wealthier taxpayers and not be well targeted. “Low and most middle-income families will receive no or minimal benefit as you can’t claim the maximum credit until you’re pretty well off,” Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Institute on Taxation […]

Financial Times: ‘It’s a Matter of Fairness’: Squeezing More Tax From Multinationals

July 8, 2020

Since the late 1980s, there has been a complete change in mindset, one pioneered and taken to its extreme by General Electric, America’s biggest manufacturer by market capitalisation for most of the past 40 years. Under the late Jack Welch, who ran the company from 1981 to 2001, a tiny corporate tax team was transformed […]

Nonprofit Quarterly: The $370 Billion Fiscal Cliff: Why State Budgets Need Our Attention

June 30, 2020

A 2018 study released by the nonprofit Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy finds that the poorest fifth spend on average 11.4 percent of their income on state and local taxes, compared to 7.4 percent for the top one percent. As Peter Sabonis wrote for NPQ this spring, particularly during times of crisis, we rely […]

Law 360: Biz Tax Credit Proposals Would Aid Wealthy, Report Says

June 30, 2020

Republican proposals to make business tax credits refundable to mitigate the economic downturn caused by the novel coronavirus pandemic would provide unnecessary tax breaks to high-income people, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy said in a report. Read more

POLITICO Morning Tax: Welcome, commissioner

June 30, 2020

FOOT OFF THE ACCELERATOR, PLEASE: The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy’s Matthew Gardner and Steve Wamhoff maintain in a new paper that the proposals to allow companies to cash out on their tax credits won’t just help businesses in desperate need of cash. Instead, they argue that companies like Amazon and Netflix, which are already […]

The Fiscal Times: A ‘Wacky’ Tax Credit Idea: $4,000 for Vacation

June 23, 2020

Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, says that the loose requirements in the bill mean “that any car owner with an ounce of creativity should be able to gin up an excuse for taking a tax credit for every tank of gas they’ve purchased in 2020.” That, says […]

The Dallas Morning News: DACA Texans Are Essential to our COVID-19 Response and Economic Future

June 22, 2020

In total, Texas is home to more than 107,000 DACA recipients, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Those DACA recipients pay $244.5 million annually in state and local taxes, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates. Read more

Sentinel & Enterprise: It’s Been a Year Without Equal

June 21, 2020

Instead, the last real action on the fiscal 2021 budget came in January when Baker rolled out a $44.6 billion spending plan that would have its underlying assumptions wiped away before lawmakers could try their hands at producing a budget of their own. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy this week said that “despite […]

CNN: This Is Who’s Affected by the Supreme Court Decision on DACA

June 18, 2020

According to a 2018 report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the young undocumented immigrants who are enrolled in DACA and those who would be eligible for the program if it were still accepting new applicants contribute about $1.7 billion in state and local taxes annually. That figure includes personal income, property, and […]

Crain’s New York Business: Legalizing Marijuana Can’t Cure Inequality, But It Will Ease Budget Crisis

June 14, 2020

My methodology is informed by the work of Carl Davis, research director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, who recently published a thoughtful blog post on per-capita cannabis excise tax collections. Davis found that last year more than $1.9 billion of tax revenue was collected across seven adult-use states (Alaska, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon, […]

POLITICO: States Move Cautiously in Contending With Huge Budget Gaps

June 5, 2020

“This crisis is still in its very early stages,” said Carl Davis of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Davis noted that the last recession began in December 2007, about nine months before the global financial system really imploded. And yet, many state tax increases didn’t happen until 2009 or even later as they […]

Minneapolis Star Tribune: Minnesota Companies Cashing in on CARES Act Business Tax Breaks

June 2, 2020

Other taxation watchdogs call it a windfall, and one that disproportionately benefits large companies with volatile earnings, not the neighborhood auto shop or hair salon whose business vanished in the wake of COVID-19. Plus, unlike the Paycheck Protection Program, which has limits on how the loans can be used in order for the loan to […]

Salon.com: About 75% of Trump’s Proposed Coronavirus Capital Gains Tax Cut Would Go to the Top 1% of Earners

May 30, 2020

Steve Wamhoff, the director of federal tax policy at the liberal-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), argued that “proponents of capital gains tax breaks have always offered a weak argument that they encourage investment” but Trump’s proposal is more dubious given that it is only a temporary cut. A temporary cut “is supported […]

USA Today: Biden wants Amazon to ‘start paying their taxes’

May 26, 2020

Amazon’s position is that it pays what it owes according to the tax code. A recent analysis by the liberal-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy said that, despite reporting $29 billion of U.S. income over the last three years, the company has reported a total of zero current federal income taxes over the same period. “In fact, […]

Politico Morning Tax: The Related Note

May 26, 2020

It’s not the first time Biden has called out Amazon on taxes, nor was it the first time the company fired back. “We pay every cent owed,” Amazon tweeted. “Assume your complaint is w/ the tax code, not Amazon.” The liberal Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy regularly details how much or, generally, how little […]

Tampa Bay Times: They Pay Taxes, But There’s No Stimulus Money for Them

May 24, 2020

In Florida, passing the HEROES Act and extending the CARES Act retroactively would help an additional 277,240 people — those living in households where at least one member uses a taxpayer identification number, according to the Institute On Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonpartisan tax policy organization in Washington, D.C. Read more

Courier Post: NJ should provide COVID-19 aid to undocumented immigrants who pay income tax

May 22, 2020

About 475,000 immigrants without legal status live in New Jersey, according to 2018 figures by the Pew Research Center. Workers who do not have legal status pay more than $11.7 billion in state and local taxes, according to a 2017 study by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a non-profit think tank. Read more

Orlando Sentinel: Is Wall Street Journal right? Is Florida “well-managed?” It depends

May 22, 2020

New York’s tax burdens are relatively even. The effective rate for New York’s poorest is 11.4 percent, compared to 11.3 for the top one percent and 12.4 for the middle. The comparisons are by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which last updated them in 2018. So it’s obvious why the Journal resents New […]

Members of the media rely on ITEP for analysis and insight about how tax policies affect people. If you’re a reporter looking to talk to one of our experts, contact Jon Whiten at [email protected].