North Carolina

The 2025 federal tax law risks making 529 plans more costly for states by increasing tax avoidance and allowing wealthy families to use these funds for private and religious K-12 schools.

The Opportunity Zones program benefits wealthy investors more than it benefits disadvantaged communities.

Important tax measures were on the ballot this week, and the outcomes are clear: many voters support new state and local spending to support critical services in their communities.

Local governments have a critical role to play in reducing child poverty. Local Child Tax Credits could provide large tax cuts to families at the bottom of the income scale, lessening the overall regressivity of state and local tax systems.

Federal policy choices on tariffs, taxes, and spending cuts will be deeply felt by all states, which will have less money available to fund key priorities. This year some states raised revenue to ensure that their coffers were well-funded, some proceeded with warranted caution, and many others passed large regressive tax cuts that pile on to the massive tax cuts the wealthiest just received under the federal megabill.

Sales tax holidays are often marketed as relief for everyday families, but they do little to address the deeper inequities of regressive sales taxes. In 2025, 18 states offer these holidays at a collective cost of $1.3 billion.

If instead of giving $117 billion to the richest 1 percent, that money had been evenly divided among all Americans, we'd each get $343 - or nearly $1,400 for a family of four.

President Trump has signed into law the tax and spending “megabill” that largely favors the richest taxpayers and provides working-class Americans with relatively small tax cuts that will in many cases be more than offset by Trump's tariffs.