Lawmakers who support reducing or eliminating state personal income taxes typically claim that doing so will spur economic growth. Often, this claim is accompanied by the assertion that states without income taxes are booming, and that their success could be replicated by any state that abandons its income tax. To help evaluate these arguments, this study compares the economic performance of the nine states without broad-based personal income taxes to their mirror opposites—the nine states levying the highest top marginal personal income tax rates throughout the last decade.
Nick Buffie
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report October 26, 2017 Trickle-Down Dries Up: States without personal income taxes lag behind states with the highest top tax rates
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blog July 28, 2017 Art Laffer and Stephen Moore’s Misleading Case for the Trump Tax Cuts
Art Laffer and Stephen Moore recently penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which they called on state and local policymakers to support the Trump tax cuts. They claimed that the Trump plan would provide a significant boost to state and local tax revenues, thereby allowing states with large budget deficits to “regain fiscal health.”
State and local lawmakers should not be fooled by these claims. The reality is that Trump’s tax cuts are more likely to worsen state and local fiscal health than improve it.