Publication Search Results
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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 revenues by roughly $34 million… -
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 income taxes, sales and excise… -
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 report) assesses the fairness of… -
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 2013, the national poverty rate… -
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.
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brief July 30, 2014 Options for Progressive Sales Tax Relief
See the 2016 Updated Brief Here Read the Policy Brief in PDF Form Sales taxes are one of the most important revenue sources for state and local governments—and are also… -
report July 21, 2014 State Estate and Inheritance Taxes
For much of the last century, estate and inheritance taxes have played an important role in helping states to adequately fund public services in a way that improves the progressivity of state tax systems. While many of the taxes levied by state and local governments fall most heavily on low-income families, only the very wealthy pay estate and inheritance taxes.
Recent changes in the federal estate tax, however, culminating in the “fiscal cliff ” deal of early 2013, have forced states to reevaluate the structure of their estate and inheritance taxes. Unfortunately, the trend of late has tended toward weakening or completely eliminating state estate taxes. This policy brief discusses inheritance and estate taxes and how states can adopt these important components of a progressive tax structure.
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report May 28, 2014 Pay-Per-Mile Tax is Only a Partial Fix
The gasoline tax is the single largest source of funding for transportation infrastructure in the United States, but the tax is on an unsustainable course. Sluggish gas tax revenue growth has put strain on transportation budgets at the federal and state levels, and has led to countless debates around the country about how best to pay for America’s infrastructure.
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report May 21, 2014 STAMP is an Unsound Tool for Gauging the Economic Impact of Taxes
The Beacon Hill Institute (BHI), a free-market think tank located at Suffolk University, frequently uses its State Tax Analysis Modeling Program (STAMP) to perform analyses purporting to show that lowering taxes, or not raising them, will benefit state economies. But STAMP suffers from a number of serious methodological problems and should not be relied upon by anybody seeking to understand the economic impacts of state tax policies.
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brief May 20, 2014 State Gasoline Taxes: Built to Fail, But Fixable
An updated version of this brief was published on February 9, 2017. Read this report in pdf. Every state levies taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel, usually just called…