Missouri House Bill 798 would reduce personal and corporate income tax rates, fully eliminate taxes on capital gains income from sale of assets, and eliminates the state’s modest Earned Income Tax Credit that assists many working people in lower-paid jobs. HB 798 would radically transform Missouri’s income tax code into a system that privileges income from wealth over income from work, leaving many middle-income families to pay a higher income tax rate than wealthy people living off their investments.
Carl Davis
Carl Davis is the research director at ITEP, where he has worked since 2008. Carl works on a wide range of issues related to both state and federal tax policy. He has advised policymakers, researchers, and advocates on tax policy issues in nearly every state. Much of his work relates to the link between taxes and economic growth, and the shortcomings of dynamic scoring and supply-side economic theories.
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brief March 28, 2025 Advantaging Affluence: A Distributional Analysis of Missouri HB 798’s Uneven Tax Cuts for Wealth and Work
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report March 18, 2025 Shelter Skelter: How the Educational Choice for Children Act Would Use Tax Avoidance to Fuel School Privatization
The Educational Choice for Children Act of 2025 would ostensibly provide a tax break on charitable donations to organizations that give out private K-12 school vouchers. Most of the so-called “contributions,” however, would be made by wealthy people solely for the tax savings, as those savings would typically be larger than their contributions.
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report March 18, 2025 A Revenue Impact Analysis of the Educational Choice for Children Act of 2025
The Educational Choice for Children Act of 2025 would provide donors to nonprofit groups that distribute private K-12 school vouchers with a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit in exchange for their contributions. In total, the ECCA would reduce federal and state tax revenues by $10.6 billion in 2026 and by $136.3 billion over the next 10 years. Federal tax revenues would decline by $134 billion over 10 years while state revenues would decline by $2.3 billion.
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brief March 6, 2025 Proposed Missouri Tax Shelter Would Aid the Wealthy, Anti-Abortion Centers Alike
In Missouri, donations to anti-abortion pregnancy resource centers come with state tax credits valued at 70 cents on the dollar. One bill currently being debated in the state would increase that matching rate to 100 percent—that is a full, state-funded reimbursement of gifts to anti-abortion groups.
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report February 20, 2025 A Revenue Analysis of Worldwide Combined Reporting in the States
Universal adoption of mandatory worldwide combined reporting would boost state corporate income tax revenues by roughly 14 percent. Thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia would experience revenue increases totaling $19.1 billion.
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blog February 11, 2025 Turning IRS Agents to Deportation Will Reduce Public Revenues
The Trump Administration’s plan to turn IRS agents into deportation agents will result in lower tax collections in addition to the harm done to the families and communities directly affected by deportations.
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blog February 3, 2025 Policymakers Could Consider Using Tax and Transfer Policy to Reduce the Racial Retirement Wealth Gap
As we show in our recent study, this is, in part, due to longstanding discrimination shaping racial differences in economic wellbeing in the U.S. Moreover, aspects of federal and state tax policies have helped create the vast racial retirement wealth gap in place today. For this reason, we evaluate how tax and transfer policy reforms could help shrink racial retirement wealth inequality. To inform lawmakers as they approach the 2025 debates, below we offer several guiding principles.
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brief January 6, 2025 The Pitfalls of Flat Income Taxes
While most states have a graduated rate income tax, some state lawmakers have recently become enamored with the idea of moving toward flat rate taxes instead. What’s the difference? And… -
report October 7, 2024 A Distributional Analysis of Donald Trump’s Tax Plan
Former President Donald Trump has proposed a wide variety of tax policy changes. Taken together, these proposals would, on average, lead to a tax cut for the richest 5 percent of Americans and a tax increase for all other income groups.
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blog September 12, 2024 Voucher Boondoggle: House Advances Plan to Give the Wealthy $1.20 for Every $1 They Steer to Private K-12 Schools
The U.S. House Ways & Means Committee has advanced a new school voucher bill. H.R. 9462—the Educational Choice for Children Act of 2024—would create an unprecedented tax incentive designed to fund private, mostly religious, K-12 schools.
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blog September 9, 2024 The Quiet Effort to Make Single Parenthood More Expensive
After the dust settles on this year’s election, one of the most pressing issues confronting the next Congress and President will be how to deal with the expiration of the 2017 Trump tax cuts and, more specifically, who will pay for the cost of extending some or all of those cuts. Among the more widely accepted ideas circulating on the right is to raise income taxes on single parents, more than four in five of whom are women and a disproportionate share of whom are people of color.
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ITEP Work in Action August 26, 2024 ITEP’s Carl Davis: Pyramids, Cascades, and the Taxation of Business Inputs
ITEP Research Director Carl Davis gave this presentation to the New Mexico Revenue Stabilization and Tax Policy Committee on August 23, 2024. View the slides here. -
blog August 6, 2024 Minnesota Stands Out for Its Moderately Progressive Tax Code
Minnesota stands apart from the rest of the country with a moderately progressive tax system that asks slightly more of the rich than of low- and middle-income families. Recent reforms signed by Gov. Tim Walz have contributed to this reality.
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report July 30, 2024 Tax Payments by Undocumented Immigrants
Undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022. Providing access to work authorization for undocumented immigrants would increase their tax contributions both because their wages would rise and because their rates of tax compliance would increase.
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report June 26, 2024 States Should Enact, Expand Mansion Taxes to Advance Fairness and Shared Prosperity
The report was produced in partnership with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and co-authored by CBPP’s Deputy Director of State Policy Research Samantha Waxman.[1] Click here to use… -
brief April 16, 2024 Is California Really a High-Tax State?
Key Findings For families of modest means, California is not a high-tax state. California taxes are close to the national average for families in the bottom 80 percent of the… -
blog April 1, 2024 Five Things to Know About Tax Foundation’s Critique of Maryland’s Worldwide Combined Reporting Proposal
Maryland lawmakers are considering enacting worldwide combined reporting (WWCR), also known as complete reporting. This policy offers a more accurate, and less gameable, way to calculate the amount of profit… -
report February 6, 2024 Tax Policy to Reduce Racial Retirement Wealth Inequality
Historic and ongoing discrimination have created stark racial disparities in the US, and the racial retirement wealth gap is one such example.
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ITEP Work in Action February 5, 2024 Video: ITEP’s Carl Davis Discusses ‘Who Pays?’ at Rhode Island Revenue Roundtable
ITEP researcher Carl Davis joins the Economic Progress Institute (EPI) for Rhode Island’s Revenue Roundtable.
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ITEP Work in Action January 29, 2024 ITEP’s Carl Davis: Who Pays Vermont Taxes?
ITEP Research Director Carl Davis gave a presentation on Vermont’s tax system to that state’s Ways and Means Committee on January 25, 2024. Click here for the slide deck. -
blog January 24, 2024 New Mexico Making Tremendous Progress Making Taxes Less Regressive
Recent tax reforms have helped to bring greater balance to New Mexico’s tax code. A new in-depth look at taxes in all 50 states finds New Mexico is an emerging leader, though there’s still plenty of room for improvement.
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blog January 22, 2024 Latest Kansas Tax Plan Would Provide an Estimated $875,000 Tax Cut to Charles Koch
Last week, both houses of the Kansas legislature approved a significant tax cut centered around replacing the state’s graduated rate income tax structure with a flat tax instead. The bulk… -
blog January 19, 2024 How the Fairness of State Tax Codes Affects Public Education
The findings of Who Pays? go a long way toward explaining why so many states are failing to raise the amount of revenue needed to provide full and robust support for our public schools.
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blog January 9, 2024 In Most States, the Tax Code Makes Inequality Worse
The vast majority of state and local tax systems are upside-down, with the wealthy paying a far lesser share of their income in taxes than low- and middle-income families. Yet a few states have made strides to buck that trend and have tax codes that are somewhat progressive and therefore do not worsen inequality.
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brief November 7, 2023 Far From Radical: State Corporate Income Taxes Already Often Look Beyond the Water’s Edge
State lawmakers are increasingly interested in reforming their corporate tax bases to start from a comprehensive measure of worldwide profit. This provides a more accurate, and less gameable, starting point for calculating profits subject to state corporate tax. Mandating this kind of filing system, known as worldwide combined reporting (WWCR), would be transformative, as it would all but eliminate state corporate tax avoidance done through the artificial shifting of profits into low-tax countries.