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report
February 16, 2015
Most Americans Live in States with Variable-Rate Gas Taxes
The federal government and many states are seeing shortfalls in their transportation budgets in part because the gasoline taxes they use to generate those funds are poorly designed. Thirty-one states and the federal government levy “fixed-rate” gas taxes where the tax rate does not change even as the cost of infrastructure materials inevitably increases over time. The federal government’s 18.4 cent gas tax, for example, has not increased in over 22 years. And twenty states have gone a decade or more without a gas tax increase.
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report
February 10, 2015
How Long Has it Been Since Your State Raised Its Gas Tax?
An updated version of this report has been published with data through July 1, 2017. Read the report in PDF form. Many states’ transportation budgets… -
report
February 5, 2015
Grocery Tax Exemption Is No Improvement for Idaho
Read as a PDF. A proposal to eliminate Idaho’s Grocery Credit Refund and create a sales tax exemption for all grocery purchases would reduce state… -
report
January 30, 2015
Who Pays? (Fourth Edition)
Major tax overhauls are on the agenda in a record number of states, and “Who Pays?” documents in state-by-state detail the precise distribution of state… -
blog
January 20, 2015
Who Pays? Report Brings out the Red Herring Brigade
Last week, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy released Who Pays?, a report that examines the state and local tax system in all 50… -
report
January 10, 2015
Who Pays? Fifth Edition
Read the Report in PDF The 2015 Who Pays: A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems in All Fifty States (the fifth edition of the… -
blog
September 18, 2014
What's the Matter with Kansas Is What Ails All 50 States
It’s easy to hold up Kansas as the poster child for regressive tax policies gone awry. By now it’s apparent Gov. Sam Brownback and his… -
report
September 18, 2014
State Tax Codes As Poverty Fighting Tools
Read the Report in PDF Form The Census Bureau released data in September showing that the share of Americans living in poverty remains high. In… -
blog
September 16, 2014
Poverty Data Not Surprising, No Matter How You Spin It
The top 20 percent of households captured more of the nation’s collective income (51 percent) than the rest of population, according to the Census report… -
report
August 5, 2014
Sales Tax Holidays: An Ineffective Alternative to Real Sales Tax Reform
Sales taxes are an important revenue source, comprising close to half of all state revenues in 2013. But sales taxes are also inherently regressive because the lower a family’s income, the more of its income the family must spend on things subject to the tax.
