
• By ITEP Staff
More than three billion dollars could be raised under a major progressive tax plan proposed by Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker this week, the point being to simultaneously improve the state’s upside-down tax code and address its notorious budget gap issues. One state, Utah, may already be looking at a special session to revisit the sales tax reform debate that ended this week without resolution, in contrast to Alabama and Arkansas, where leaders finally resolved years-long…
• By ITEP Staff
As noted, of the three deductions, by far the most taxpayers took advantage of the deduction for self-employment taxes. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which has a model of the federal and Ohio tax systems, roughly estimates that 330,000 of the Ohio taxpayers who had business income and took the self-employment tax deduction […]
• By ITEP Staff
State policymakers around the nation this week served up a handful of harmful and upside-down tax proposals, but these were refreshingly outnumbered by sound tax and budget policy proposals in several other states. NEW JERSEY Gov. Phil Murphy made tax fairness an explicit priority in his budget address, the NEW MEXICO House passed progressive reforms to improve the state’s schools and tax code, states such as VERMONT are looking to raise funds from legalized cannabis…
March 6, 2019
According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, 27 states have raised their gas taxes since 2013, including every state adjacent to Ohio. The gas tax affects what people pay at the gas pump, but the effect is not always obvious. Read more
• By ITEP Staff
As another polar vortex heads for large swaths of the country, state tax debates this week were highly polarized in another way. Lawmakers and advocates in MICHIGAN, OHIO, OREGON, UTAH, and elsewhere fought to enact or improve state Earned Income Tax Credits to give a boost to low- and middle-income working families. But the opposite extreme was heavily represented as well, as others pushed for regressive tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations, including in…
• By Carl Davis
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.
• By ITEP Staff
Tom Robbins called February “the meanest moon of winter, all the more cruel because it will masquerade as spring, occasionally for hours at a time, only to rip off its mask with a sadistic laugh and spit icicles into every gullible face, behavior that grows quickly old.” Observers of state fiscal debates might think he was writing about similarly tiresome regressive tax cut proposals, which recently succeeded in Arkansas and advanced in North Dakota despite…
• By ITEP Staff
Happy Valentine’s Day to all lovers of quality research, sound fiscal policy, and progressive tax reforms! This week, some leaders in ARKANSAS displayed their infatuation with the rich by advancing regressive tax cuts, but others in the state are trying to show some love to low- and middle-income families instead. WISCONSIN lawmakers are devoted to tax reductions for the middle class but have not yet decided how to express those feelings. NEBRASKA legislators are playing…
• By ITEP Staff
Consumption taxes are a significant source of state and local revenue, and we expect that lawmakers will continue to adjust state consumption tax levies to adapt to budget needs and a changing economy.
• By Aidan Davis
Continuing to build upon the momentum of previous years, states are taking steps to create and improve targeted tax breaks meant to lift their most in-need state residents up and out of poverty. Most notably, a range of states are exploring ways to restore, enhance or create state Earned Income Tax Credits (EITC). EITCs are an effective tool to help struggling families with low wages make ends meet and provide necessities for their children. The…
• By ITEP Staff
Gubernatorial speeches and budget proposals dominated state fiscal news this week, as governors proposed a wide array of policies including positive reforms such as Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) enhancements in CALIFORNIA, a capital gains tax on wealthy households in WASHINGTON, and investments in education in several states. Proposals to exempt more retirement income from tax, particularly for veterans, are a common theme so far this year, having been raised in multiple states including MARYLAND, MICHIGAN, and SOUTH CAROLINA. And NEW JERSEY became…
• By ITEP Staff
The Institute for Taxation & Economic Policy performed the analysis for Policy Matters. Consider that those Ohio families with annual incomes below $19,000 paid an average 12.3 percent of their income in state and local taxes. For those in the middle three quintiles, with incomes from $19,000 to $91,800 a year, the burden holds steady, […]
• By Richard Phillips
Enacting Worldwide Combined Reporting or Complete Reporting in all states, this report calculates, would increase state tax revenue by $17.04 billion dollars. Of that total, $2.85 billion would be raised through domestic Combined Reporting improvements, and $14.19 billion would be raised by addressing offshore tax dodging (see Table 1). Enacting Combined Reporting and including known tax havens would result in $7.75 billion in annual tax revenue, $4.9 billion from income booked offshore.
• By Aidan Davis
States have broad discretion in how they secure the resources to fund education, health care, infrastructure, and other priorities important to communities and families. Aidan Davis with the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy will offer a national perspective on state-level approaches to funding public investments and the implications of those approaches on tax fairness and revenue adequacy, and their economic outcomes. She’ll also provide insight on what’s in store for 2019 among the states.
• By ITEP Staff
Ohio’s upside-down tax system takes an especially heavy toll on black and Latino residents. That’s the finding of new research from the Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy (ITEP), a national nonprofit research group with a sophisticated model of the tax system, that was released today by Policy Matters Ohio. Read more
• By ITEP Staff
This week we released a handy guide of policy options for Moving Toward More Equitable State Tax Systems, and are pleased to report that many state lawmakers are promoting policies that are in line with our recommendations. For example, Puerto Rico lawmakers recently enacted a targeted EITC-like credit for working families, and leaders in Virginia and elsewhere are working toward similar improvements. Arkansas residents also saw their tax code improve as laws reducing regressive consumption…
December 21, 2018
Thanks to some bold number crunching by the nerds at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, the figure compares a regressive, supply-side tax cut, like the one we got last year, to a highly progressive expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, the GAIN Act, proposed by Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown and California Representative […]
• By ITEP Staff
State lawmakers are preparing their agendas for 2019 and looking at all sorts of tax and budget policies in the process, raising many familiar questions. Oregon legislators, for example, will try to fill in the blanks in a proposal to boost investments in education that left out detail on how to fund them, while their counterparts in Texas face the inverse problem of a proposed property tax cut that fails to clarify how schools could…
• By Matthew Gardner
GM’s most recent quarterly financial report reveals the company has saved more than $150 million so far this year due to last year’s corporate tax cuts. So the layoffs announcement may seem especially jarring to anyone who believed President Trump’s claim that his tax cuts would spur job creation—including the Ohio residents Trump told directly “don’t sell your homes” because lost auto-making jobs “are all coming back.”
• By ITEP Staff
Look out for potholes if you’re out trick-or-treating in Alabama tonight, where crumbling infrastructure figures to be a dominant debate in the coming legislative session. And be prepared to share the streets with disgruntled teachers if you‘re in Louisiana, where teachers are walking out to protest regressive tax policies that are sucking the lifeblood from the state’s schools. Meanwhile, Wisconsin residents are sharing scary stories of grotesquely large business tax subsidies and the “dark store” tax loophole they’ll be voting on next week. And…
• By ITEP Staff
It follows that low- and middle-income Ohioans pay a higher share than the national average, and wealthy Ohioans pay a lower share. To a degree, that is expected in view of the vastly larger incomes of wealthy Ohioans. At the same time, the state would be well served by altering the shares to make the state and local system more fair, to reflect how new income in recent years, even decades, has flowed largely to…
• By ITEP Staff
OHIO Read as PDF OHIO STATE AND LOCAL TAXES Taxes as Share of Family Income Top 20% Income Group Lowest 20% Second 20% Middle 20% Fourth 20% Next 15% Next 4% Top 1% Income Range Less than $19,000 $19,000 to $33,900 $33,900 to $55,500 $55,500 to $91,800 $91,800 to $188,400 $188,400 to $455,700 over $455,700 […]
• By ITEP Staff
Voters all around the country are educating themselves for the upcoming elections, notably this week around ballot initiatives in Arizona and Colorado and competing gubernatorial tax proposals in Georgia and Illinois. But not all eyes are on the elections, as the relationship between state and local policy made news in Delaware, Idaho, North Dakota, and Ohio.
• By ITEP Staff
The $2 trillion 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) includes several provisions set to expire at the end of 2025. Now, GOP leaders have introduced a bill informally called “Tax Cuts 2.0” or “Tax Reform 2.0,” which would make the temporary provisions permanent. And they falsely claim that making these provisions permanent will benefit […]
• By Aidan Davis, Misha Hill
This report presents a comprehensive overview of anti-poverty tax policies, surveys tax policy decisions made in the states in 2018, and offers recommendations that every state should consider to help families rise out of poverty. States can jumpstart their anti-poverty efforts by enacting one or more of four proven and effective tax strategies to reduce the share of taxes paid by low- and moderate-income families: state Earned Income Tax Credits, property tax circuit breakers, targeted…