District of Columbia

See the 2016 Updated Brief Here Read the brief in a PDF here.  that time, the EITC has been improved to lift and keep more working families out of poverty. The most recent improvements enhanced the credit for families with three or more children and for married couples. First enacted temporarily as part of the […]

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.

Read the Report in PDF Form An individual savings account can serve as an emergency reserve – a financial cushion to sustain yourself in the event of an emergency. “Rainy day” funds are much like individual saving accounts, but on a statewide scale. Lawmakers use rainy day funds to set aside state tax revenue during […]

The U.S. Census Bureau released data in September showing that the share of Americans living in poverty remains high. In 2014, the national poverty rate was 14.8 percent - statistically unchanged from the previous year. However, the poverty rate remains 2.3 percentage points higher than it was in 2007, before the Great Recession, indicating that recent economic gains have not yet reached all households and that there is much room for improvement. The 2014 measure translates to more than 46.7 million - more than 1 in 7 - Americans living in poverty. Most state poverty rates also held steady between…

Despite some economic gains in recent years, the number of Americans living in poverty has held steady over the past four years. At the same time, wages for working families have remained stagnant and more than half of the jobs created by the economic recovery since 2010 were low-paying, mostly in the food services, retail, and employment services industries. Our country's growing class of low-wage workers often faces a dual challenge as they struggle to make ends meet. First, wages are too low and growing too slowly - despite recent productivity gains - to keep up with the rising cost…

Read this report in PDF form Introduction For years, academics and transportation experts have been discussing the possibility of taxing drivers for each mile they travel on the nation’s roads.  This “vehicle miles traveled tax” (VMT tax) could either supplement or replace the existing gas tax as the primary method of funding transportation infrastructure. To […]

Read as a PDF. Table of Contents Introduction Why Tax Marijuana? Designing a State Tax on Marijuana How Much Revenue Would Marijuana Legalization Generate for States Factors that Could Negatively Impact Marijuana Revenue Factors that Could Positively Impact Marijuana Revenue Conclusion Endnotes Charts and Text Boxes Current Approaches to Taxing Retail Marijuana Sales How Should […]

This report was updated February 2016 Read as a PDF. (Includes Full Appendix of State-by-State Data) Report Landing Page In the public debates over federal immigration reform, sufficient and accurate information about the tax contributions of undocumented immigrants is often lacking. The reality is the 11.4 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States pay billions […]

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.

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 state and local tax systems by measuring the state and local taxes that will be paid in 2015 by different income groups as a share […]

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 allies in the state legislature were wrong when they predicted lopsided tax cuts would boost the state’s economy.  The state will have trouble funding priorities such as education and services […]

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 was 14.5 percent, a slight drop from last years’ rate of 15 percent and the first decline since 2006.1 However, the poverty rate remains 2.0 […]