Maryland

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 […]

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.

Working Marylanders with the lowest earnings will pay slightly less of their income in taxes — 9.9 percent compared to 10.1 percent now – once the expansion of the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit is fully phased in, according to a new study. That’s a small change, and the top 1 percent of income earners […]

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…

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.

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 “gas taxes.” These taxes are an important source of state revenue—particularly for transportation—but their poor design has resulted in sluggish revenue growth that fails to […]

Tax Day is a good day to remind ourselves that taxes allow our state to make investments that benefit our economy and all Maryland’s residents, and that we must continue to work to make our tax code fairer. Read the Full Report

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-two 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 twenty years. And almost half the states (24) have gone a decade or more without a gas tax increase.

While state lawmakers in Annapolis discuss cutting important services and investments in an effort to balance Maryland’s state budget, we got further evidence today that large, profitable corporations are able to avoid paying their fair share of state taxes that support those services and investments. According to a new report, the 269 Fortune 500 companies […]

Maryland residents filling out their tax forms and paying their monthly utility bills might be surprised to find out that one of the companies that 526,000 of them write checks to has been dodging its fair share. Read the Full Report

DC's tax system is markedly regressive. This is driven largely by the regressive impact of the city's sales, excise, and property taxes. The personal income tax is the only effective tool that DC has available for offsetting this regressivity. In the comments below I discuss four options for fine-tuning DC's income tax to lessen its impact on moderate- and middle-income taxpayers. I also describe four options for funding those tax cuts with policies that would increase upper-income taxpayers' effective tax rates to be more in line with those paid by their less affluent neighbors.