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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media mention April 14, 2019 Connecticut Post: Pot Tax Rate Key to Driving Down Illegal Market in Conn.
But potency-based taxation requires good laboratories and technology to accurately test THC levels, said Uetake who teaches marketing at Yale’s School of Management. “Reliability and replicability of testing remain problematic,”… -
media mention April 6, 2019 Crain’s Detroit: Legal Pot v. Black Market
“When you have so many communities opting out, you could have less quantity being sold in the legal market,” said Carl Davis, research director for Washington D.C.-based Institute on Taxation… -
media mention April 2, 2019 Bloomberg: Tax-the-Rich Fervor Builds in Statehouses After Trump’s Big Cut
The tax-the-rich proposals pending in states are “a reflection of a broader national trend towards recognizing what voters have felt for a long time — that high income individuals and… -
blog April 1, 2019 What to Watch for When the IRS Releases Its SALT Workaround Regulations
The Treasury Department and IRS last summer proposed regulations that would make it more difficult for taxpayers to avoid the $10,000 cap on deductions for state and local taxes (SALT). Now, likely days away from the unveiling of the final version of IRS regulations on SALT cap workarounds, Carl Davis recaps the finer points ITEP will be watching for when the regulations become public.
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media mention March 6, 2019 Washington Post: State and Local Tax Laws Are Making the Rich Richer
State and local taxes effectively redistribute national income from the poor to the very rich, according to data released this week by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a… -
blog March 6, 2019 How State Tax Systems Worsen the Economic Divide – in Charts
The nation is currently engaging in serious discourse about how to expand economic opportunity and remedy income inequality via the federal tax code. State tax systems are also important and have a dismal effect on the growing economic divide. In a new report, Fairness Matters: A Chart Book on Who Pays State and Local Taxes, we further parse our Who Pays? data.
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media mention March 1, 2019 Minneapolis Star-Tribune: Tax Avoidance Might Make Financial Sense, but Is It Fair?
One feature of sales taxes is that they cost lower-income people a bigger chunk of what they take in than is the case for more affluent people. In Minnesota the… -
media mention March 1, 2019 Bloomberg: Democrats In the Home of Hedge Funds Are Divided Over Tax Plans Sparing Rich
“Most public finance experts will tell you if you have sales tax it should be applied to a broad base,” said Carl Davis, the research director at the Institute on… -
media mention February 28, 2019 New York Times: Betsy DeVos Backs $5 Billion in Tax Credits for School Choice
Carl Davis, the research director for the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, noted that the new tax credit would be extremely generous in providing a 100 percent tax break,… -
media mention February 28, 2019 Marketplace: Devos Proposes $5B in Tax Credits for Scholarship Donations
This new segment features ITEP’s research director Carl Davis: -
news release February 28, 2019 Education Department Tax Credit Proposal Would Undermine Public Schools
The Education Department today announced a proposed new federal tax credit for so-called school choice. The $5 billion proposal would give those who donate to private school voucher programs a tax credit. Following is a statement by Carl Davis, research director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
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blog February 26, 2019 Overdue Gas Tax Hikes are Back on the Agenda in Statehouses
State tax policy can be a contentious topic, but one issue on which lawmakers largely agree is that higher gas tax rates are necessary to keep our nation’s infrastructure operating safely and efficiently. Lawmakers in 27 states have approved gas tax increases since 2013.
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media mention February 17, 2019 The Hill: Tech Looks for Lessons From Amazon HQ2 Fight
Amazon’s decision to scrap its plans for a second headquarters in New York City, dubbed HQ2, stunned both the tech world and its critics this week, raising new questions about the industry’s ambitious expansion plans and their dealings with state and local governments.
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report February 14, 2019 The Illusion of Race-Neutral Tax Policy
It is well known that the bulk of the federal tax cuts flowed to the highest-earning households, who received the largest tax cut both in terms of real dollars and also as a share of income. But as our analysis with Prosperity Now reveals, solely examining the tax law in the context of class misses a bigger-picture story about how the nation’s public policies not only perpetuate widening income and wealth inequality, they also preserve historic and current injustices that continue to allow white communities to build wealth while denying the same level of opportunity (and often suppressing it) to communities of color.
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blog February 13, 2019 Fact-Checking on Trump Tax Law Needs a Fact Check
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), enacted by President Trump and Congressional Republicans at the end of 2017, has caused quite a bit of confusion, and a recent “Fact Checker” column by the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler does not help. TCJA created real problems that can’t be resolved without real tax reform. To begin that process fact checkers, lawmakers, and everyone else need to be clear about what TCJA did, and did not, do to our tax system.
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blog February 7, 2019 Trends We’re Watching in 2019: Cannabis Tax Implementation and Reform
Few areas of state tax policy have evolved as rapidly as cannabis taxation over the last few years. The first legal, taxable sale of recreational cannabis in modern U.S. history did not occur until 2014. Now, just five years later, a new ITEP report estimates that recreational cannabis is generating more than $1 billion annually in excise tax revenues and $300 million more in general sales tax dollars.
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media mention January 24, 2019 Politico: Let’s Talk Wealth Tax
Steve Wamhoff at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy projects that a wealth tax could raise well over $1 trillion in a decade, and notes that wealth inequality far… -
report January 23, 2019 Taxing Cannabis
State policy toward cannabis is evolving rapidly. While much of the debate around legalization has rightly focused on potential health and criminal justice impacts, legalization also has revenue implications for state and local governments that choose to regulate and tax cannabis sales. This report describes the various options for structuring state and local taxes on cannabis and identifies approaches currently in use. It also undertakes an in-depth exploration of state cannabis tax revenue performance and offers a glimpse into what may lie ahead for these taxes.
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blog January 23, 2019 Cannabis Tax Debates are Ramping Up; Here’s What We’ve Learned from Five Years of Cannabis Taxation Thus Far
This year lawmakers in Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont will all be debating the taxation of recreational cannabis. A new ITEP report reviews the track record of recreational cannabis taxes thus far and offers recommendations for structuring cannabis taxes to achieve stable revenue growth over the long haul.
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media mention November 26, 2018 New York Daily News: Cyber Monday Shopping Deals Blunting by Supreme Court Ruling
“This is about improved enforcement of a tax that’s already on the books,” echoed Carl Davis, research director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, to CNBC. “For years,… -
media mention November 14, 2018 CBS News: Can New York Make Back Its Amazon Investment
Opponents of corporate subsidies said Amazon’s choices prove taxpayer incentives matter much less than advertised. “[A]ccess to an educated workforce and high-quality public amenities are what drive business location decisions… -
report November 14, 2018 A Fair Way to Limit Tax Deductions
The cap on federal tax deductions for state and local taxes (SALT) that is in effect now under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) is a flawed provision but repealing it outright would be costly and provide a windfall to the rich. Congress should consider replacing the SALT cap with a different type of limit on deductions that would avoid both of these outcomes. Using the ITEP microsimulation tax model, this report provides revenue estimates and distributional estimates for several such options, assuming they would be in effect in 2019.
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blog November 13, 2018 Three Tax Takeaways on Amazon’s Expansion Announcement
Today Amazon announced major expansions in New York and Virginia, where it intends to hire up to 50,000 full-time employees. The announcement marks the culmination of a highly publicized search that lasted more than a year and involved aggressive courting of the company by cities across the nation. The following are three tax-related observations on the announcement.
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media mention November 12, 2018 Yahoo! Finance: How Trump’s Tax Cuts Hurt the GOP in America’s Wealthy Suburbs
Carl Davis, research director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, told Yahoo Finance that the same story has been playing out across the country. “I think Californians and… -
November 5, 2018 Comments to be delivered during IRS hearing on “Contributions in Exchange for State or Local Tax Credits” (REG-112176-18)
ITEP views this proposal as a sensible improvement, and one that is actually overdue, to the way the charitable deduction is administered. At the end of my remarks I will discuss a few ways that the regulation could be improved. But the core point I want to emphasize is that the general approach taken here, where quid pro quo rules are applied in a broad-based fashion to all significant state and local tax credits, is the correct one.