Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy

Select Media Mentions

The Hill: You Should Care About the Dream Act

June 15, 2019

These beliefs are simply untrue. Dreamers, DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) recipients, and undocumented immigrants pay taxes including sales tax and local real estate tax. Many pay Medicare, state and federal taxes, and even Social Security tax (though undocumented immigrants are not eligible for Social Security benefits). In fact, undocumented immigrants working in the […]

Vox, The Weeds: 5 Big Ideas to Use Tax Credits to Fight Poverty

June 14, 2019

Meg Wiehe from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy explains the leading progressive tax plans in Congress and how they differ from Trump’s tax cuts. Listen to the podcast

Wall Street Journal: Does Amazon Really Pay No Taxes?

June 14, 2019

“I’ll cheerfully acknowledge that [the current provision] is not what we want to really know, but it’s also the closest thing we’re ever going to see,” said Matt Gardner, senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the left-leaning group whose report on Amazon and other companies drew Democrats’ attention. Read more

The Hill: Biden Criticizes Amazon for Paying $0 in Corporate Taxes

June 14, 2019

A report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy earlier this year found that 60 Fortune 500 companies, including Amazon, avoided paying any federal income taxes in 2018. Amazon, which had $11.2 billion in profits last year, has become a prime target for Democrats seeking to criticize corporate power, potentially anticompetitive practices and dangerous working conditions.Read more

Newsweek: We Need to Reward Work

June 14, 2019

An April report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that 60 companies on the Fortune 500 did not pay any income tax on $79 billion last year and actually earned rebate totaling $4.3 billion. Amazon, which earned $11 billion in income and received a $129 million rebate from the government, was the […]

Geekwire:Amazon fires back at Joe Biden on Twitter over corporate taxes: ‘We pay every penny we owe’

June 14, 2019

A report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy revealed that 60 companies on the Fortune 500 did not pay income tax and instead earned corporate tax rebates of $4.3 billion. Biden is not the first presidential candidate to take aim at Amazon on Twitter. Sen. Elizabeth Warren did the same in April, accusing […]

CNBC: Joe Biden’s Twitter fight with Amazon perfectly sums up the battle over America’s new tax code

June 14, 2019

Biden’s tweet linked to a New York Times story that cited data from the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy on companies that earned billions of dollars last year but paid no federal taxes. The analysis showed that Amazon topped the list, with pretax profits of nearly $11 billion. In fact, the group found […]

KEYE TV: Colorado made $1B in marijuana tax revenue: What could this mean for federal legalization?

June 13, 2019

Tax experts explained that government revenue from cannabis is not a panacea for solving the country’s budget issues, but it could certainly help. According to a study by Carl Davis, the research director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a federal push to legalize marijuana and regulate commercial sales could potentially generate nearly […]

Fox Business:Joe Biden slams Amazon for not paying federal taxes: You ‘should pay a few taxes’

June 12, 2019

By leveraging unspecified tax credits and stock-based compensation deductions, the company didn’t pay the 21 percent U.S. corporate tax. Instead, as first reported by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Amazon received a federal income tax rebate of $129 million, essentially amounting to a tax rate of negative 1 percent. Read more

CNBC: Feds block tax breaks for donating to these charitable state funds

June 12, 2019

These programs range from conservation easements to private school tuition scholarships. “The private school organizations were asking for full-scale carveouts for themselves; they wanted to be exempt if the program was designed to benefit private entities instead of public ones,” said Carl Davis, research director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Read more

Bloomberg: When an Eight-Figure IPO Windfall Can Mean a Zero-Digit Tax Bill

June 10, 2019

It’s supposed to help young companies attract capital. The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation says the provision costs the U.S. Treasury $1.3 billion a year. “There is no evidence that these sorts of breaks do anything to help the economy in the long run,” says Steve Wamhoff, director of federal tax policy at the left-leaning […]

Commonwealth Magazine: Progressive Taxation, Let’s Do It Right

June 10, 2019

In spite of Article 44’s boundaries, the Commonwealth has effectively mitigated the flat tax for people at the lower end of the income scale by using exemptions and tax credits. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the bottom twenty percent of filers in Massachusetts pay virtually no state income tax. The next twenty percent […]

FoxBusiness: U.S. Companies Paid $91 Billion Less in Taxes

June 4, 2019

Plus, in 2018, 60 of America’s biggest companies paid $0 in federal taxes Opens a New Window. , despite earning billions of dollars in profits. That includes Amazon, Netflix, General Motors, Chevron, JetBlue, IBM and U.S. Steel, which all used a diverse array of loopholes and tax breaks, according to a report from the INstitute […]

Washington Post: Why the U.S. Economy Is Worse than It Seems

June 4, 2019

Even more remarkably, the top 1 percent of households now hold 31 percent of the nation’s wealth (assets minus liabilities), or $30 trillion, while the entire bottom half of the nation’s households hold only about 1 percent, or $1 trillion. That comes to $23 million per household for the top 1 percent and $18,000 in […]

Washington Post: The Trump Tax Cuts Are Failing Badly

June 1, 2019

Giving companies more incentive to invest, then, won’t do much if they don’t have a reason to invest in the first place — which they haven’t recently. This raises the possibility that the Trump tax cuts won’t just be regressive but almost cartoonishly so. Consider this: According to a separate analysis by the left-leaning Institute […]

Newark Star-Ledger: Will This Tax Plan Boost Booker’s Campaign?

May 31, 2019

In New Jersey, almost three-quarters of the benefits, 74 percent, would flow to the poorest 40 percent of taxpayers, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a progressive research group. Under the the Trump tax law, 72 percent of the benefits went to the richest 20 percent in the state and capped the […]

Yahoo! Finance: Corporations Paid $91 Billion Less in Taxes in 2018 under Trump’s Tax Law

May 31, 2019

“There are a lot of breaks and loopholes that allow a company not to pay,” said Steve Wamhoff, director of federal tax policy at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP). “People, when they think of tax reform, think the government is going to fix the tax code and get rid of breaks and […]

The Tennessean: Our Tax System Is Immoral and Unfair to the Middle Class | Opinion

May 30, 2019

Recently, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy shared an analysis of Fortune 500 companies that finds at least 60 of the nation’s biggest corporations didn’t pay one cent in federal income taxes in 2018 and in turn had a collective $79 billion in profits. It is based on 2018 financial filings of the country’s […]

Winston Salem-Journal: Five Basic Truths About the State Budget

May 28, 2019

The budget is unfair and unjust: North Carolina has always relied upon a regressive tax structure that takes more from the incomes of the poor and middle-class than from the wealthy. But this pattern has grown significantly worse and more unfair in recent years as the personal income tax was flattened and cut and corporate […]

The Columbus Dispatch: Business Groups Pushing to Save Tax Breaks for Richest Ohioans

May 25, 2019

Policy Matters says the analysis, completed by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, found that virtually all of the Ohio tax filers who would pay more under the overall House plan are among the top 5% of Ohio taxpayers, making over $208,000. Read more

Akron Beacon Journal: A $1 Billion State Tax Break Still Worth Shrinking

May 24, 2019

What does the House propose? It would reduce the exemption to the first $100,000 in “pass through” income and wipe out the special 3 percent tax rate. That would save $528 million a year. It would do so without affecting 86 percent of those claiming the exemption. Who would see a change? Policy Matters Ohio […]

New Hampshire Business Review: Some NH Firms Paid Little or No Tax in 2018

May 23, 2019

Those companies are hardly unique. “Not a Dime,” a recent study by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), found that at least 60 of the Fortune 500 companies paid no taxes to the federal government in 2018, even though they made substantial profits. (There may be more, but the financial filings for the […]

New York Times: Democrats’ Tax Cuts Target Middle Class More Than Trump’s, Study Says

May 22, 2019

Tax plans from several Democratic candidates for president would cost less than President Trump’s signature tax cuts but deliver larger benefits to most low- and middle-income Americans, according to a new analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a liberal think tank in Washington. The analysis is one of the first to examine […]

Arizona Daily Sun: Tax Dodgers Inc.

May 21, 2019

How is it possible to pay less than zero? By riddling the tax code with so many special deductions and gimmicks that the government owes you money! On tax day this year, a watchdog group called ITEP (Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy) issued a report documenting that 60 of America’s biggest corporations used the […]

Wharton: Have Stock Buybacks Gone Too Far?

May 16, 2019

Fueled by the lower corporate tax rate, share buybacks among S&P 500 companies shot to a fourth consecutive record in the last quarter of 2018, according to Standard & Poor’s. What’s more is that the lower tax rate enabled dozens of profitable Fortune 500 companies such as Amazon and IBM to avoid paying federal taxes […]

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].