
This week, major tax packages relating to the federal tax-cut bill made news in Georgia, Iowa, and Louisiana, as Minnesota and Oregon lawmakers also continue to work out how their states will be affected. New Mexico's legislative session has finished without significant tax changes, while Idaho and Illinois's sessions are beginning to heat up, and Vermont's school funding system is under the microscope.
This Valentine's week finds California, Georgia, Missouri, New York, Oregon, and other states flirting with the idea of coupling to various components of the federal tax-cut bill. Meanwhile, lawmakers seeking revenue solutions to budget shortfalls in Alaska, Oklahoma, and Wyoming saw their advances spurned, and anti-tax advocates in many states have been getting mixed responses to their tax-cut proposals. And be sure to check out our "what we're reading" section to see how states are getting no love in recent federal budget developments.
February 8, 2018 • By ITEP Staff
Several states this week are looking at ways to revamp their tax codes in response to the federal tax cut bill, with Georgia, Idaho, Maryland, Nebraska, and Vermont all actively considering proposals. Meanwhile, Connecticut, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania are working on resolving their budget shortfalls. And transportation funding is getting needed attention in Mississippi, Utah, and Wisconsin.
January 4, 2018 • By ITEP Staff
This week marks the beginning of what is bound to be a wild year for state tax and budget debates. Essentially every state is already working to sort through the complicated ramifications of the federal tax cuts passed in December, including Kansas, Michigan, Montana, and New Jersey highlighted below. These and other states will have important decisions to make about how to incorporate, reject, or mitigate various aspects of the new federal law, and will need considerable resolve to improve state tax policy to be more fair and more adequate – even as federal taxes become less so.
January 1, 2018
Burlington County Times: Will Phil Murphy raise NJ’s taxes (and 4 other political questions for .. Kaplan Herald: This chart exhibits how the GOP tax plan will hit your pockets Wiscnews: Tax cuts increase inequity Patch.com: MacArthur Touts Tax Reform; Will It Help NJ As Much As He Says? NJ.com: Long lines spring up as […]
December 16, 2017 • By ITEP Staff
The final tax bill that Republicans in Congress are poised to approve would provide most of its benefits to high-income households and foreign investors while raising taxes on many low- and middle-income Americans. The bill would go into effect in 2018 but the provisions directly affecting families and individuals would all expire after 2025, with […]
December 16, 2017 • By ITEP Staff
The final Trump-GOP tax law provides most of its benefits to high-income households and foreign investors while raising taxes on many low- and middle-income Americans. The bill goes into effect in 2018 but the provisions directly affecting families and individuals all expire after 2025, with the exception of one provision that would raise their taxes. To get an idea of how the bill will affect Americans at different income levels in different years, this analysis focuses on the bill’s impacts in 2019 and 2027.
December 13, 2017 • By ITEP Staff
Supermajority requirements for tax increases are proving a major obstacle to responsible budgeting in Oklahoma, while ballot initiatives are being filed to alter or abolish Oregon‘s similar requirement, but a similar requirement is slowly advancing toward the ballot in Florida nonetheless. Displeasure with agricultural property taxes are spawning both a ballot initiative drive and a […]
December 7, 2017 • By ITEP Staff
Though most eyes were on Congress rather than states this week, several states have been taking stock of their fiscal situations. Wyoming lawmakers considered ways to resolve budget shortfalls, Kansas and New Mexico legislators got some minor good news about their states' revenues, their counterparts in Minnesota and Vermont grappled with less encouraging revenue news, and those in West Virginia were just happy to hear their revenues had at least met expectations for once.
December 6, 2017 • By ITEP Staff
The House passed its “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” November 16th and the Senate passed its version December 2nd. Both bills would raise taxes on many low- and middle-income families in every state and provide the wealthiest Americans and foreign investors substantial tax cuts, while adding more than $1.4 trillion to the deficit over ten years. The graph below shows that both bills are skewed to the richest 1 percent of Wyoming residents.
December 6, 2017 • By ITEP Staff
The House passed its “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” November 16th and the Senate passed its version December 2nd. Both bills would raise taxes on many low- and middle-income families in every state and provide the wealthiest Americans and foreign investors substantial tax cuts, while adding more than $1.4 trillion to the deficit over ten years. National and 50-State data available to download.
November 18, 2017 • By ITEP Staff
The tax bill reported out of the Senate Finance Committee on Nov. 16 would raise taxes on at least 29 percent of Americans and cause the populations of 19 states to pay more in federal taxes in 2027 than they do today.
November 14, 2017 • By ITEP Staff
The Senate tax bill released last week would raise taxes on some families while bestowing immense benefits on wealthy Americans and foreign investors. In Wyoming, 56 percent of the federal tax cuts would go to the richest 5 percent of residents, and 6 percent of households would face a tax increase, once the bill is fully implemented.
November 6, 2017 • By Matthew Gardner, Meg Wiehe, Steve Wamhoff
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which was introduced on Nov. 2 in the House of Representatives, would raise taxes on some Americans and cut taxes on others while also providing significant savings to foreign investors.
November 6, 2017 • By ITEP Staff
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which was introduced on November 2 in the House of Representatives, includes some provisions that raise taxes and some that cut taxes, so the net effect for any particular family’s federal tax bill depends on their situation. Some of the provisions that benefit the middle class — like lower tax rates, an increased standard deduction, and a $300 tax credit for each adult in a household — are designed to expire or become less generous over time. Some of the provisions that benefit the wealthy, such as the reduction and eventual repeal of the estate…
October 26, 2017 • By Carl Davis, Nick Buffie
Lawmakers who support reducing or eliminating state personal income taxes typically claim that doing so will spur economic growth. Often, this claim is accompanied by the assertion that states without income taxes are booming, and that their success could be replicated by any state that abandons its income tax. To help evaluate these arguments, this study compares the economic performance of the nine states without broad-based personal income taxes to their mirror opposites—the nine states levying the highest top marginal personal income tax rates throughout the last decade.
October 4, 2017 • By Steve Wamhoff
The “tax reform framework” released by the Trump administration and Congressional Republican leaders on September 27 would affect states differently, but every state would see its richest residents grow richer if it is enacted. In all but a handful of states, at least half of the tax cuts would flow to the richest one percent of residents if the framework took effect.
October 4, 2017 • By ITEP Staff
The “tax reform framework” released by the Trump administration and congressional Republican leaders on September 27 would not benefit everyone in Wyoming equally. The richest one percent of Wyoming residents would receive 70.7 percent of the tax cuts within the state under the framework in 2018. These households are projected to have an income of at least $542,400 next year. The framework would provide them an average tax cut of $180,480 in 2018, which would increase their income by an average of 7.3 percent.
August 17, 2017 • By ITEP Staff
A tiny fraction of the U.S. population (one-half of one percent) earns more than $1 million annually. But in 2018 this elite group would receive 48.8 percent of the tax cuts proposed by the Trump administration. A much larger group, 44.6 percent of Americans, earn less than $45,000, but would receive just 4.4 percent of the tax cuts.
August 17, 2017 • By ITEP Staff
A tiny fraction of the Wyoming population (0.5 percent) earns more than $1 million annually. But this elite group would receive 57.3 percent of the tax cuts that go to Wyoming residents under the tax proposals from the Trump administration. A much larger group, 39.4 percent of the state, earns less than $45,000, but would receive just 2.6 percent of the tax cuts.
2017 marked a sea change in state tax policy and a stark departure from the current federal tax debate as dubious supply-side economic theories began to lose their grip on statehouses. Compared to the predominant trend in recent years of emphasizing top-heavy income tax cuts and shifting to more regressive consumption taxes in the hopes […]
July 20, 2017 • By Alan Essig
Not only would President Trump’s proposed tax plan fail to deliver on its promise of largely helping middle-class taxpayers, it also would shower a disproportionate share of the total tax cut on taxpayers in some of the richest states while southern and a few other states would receive a smaller share of the tax cut […]
July 20, 2017 • By ITEP Staff
Earlier this year, the Trump administration released some broadly outlined proposals to overhaul the federal tax code. Households in Wyoming would not benefit equally from these proposals. The richest one percent of the state’s taxpayers are projected to make an average income of $3,008,400 in 2018.
July 20, 2017 • By Matthew Gardner, Steve Wamhoff
The broadly outlined tax proposals released by the Trump administration would not benefit all taxpayers equally and they would not benefit all states equally either. Several states would receive a share of the total resulting tax cuts that is less than their share of the U.S. population. Of the dozen states receiving the least by this measure, seven are in the South. The others are New Mexico, Oregon, Maine, Idaho and Hawaii.
June 14, 2017 • By ITEP Staff
This week lawmakers in California and Nevada resolved significant tax debates, while budget and tax wrangling continued in West Virginia, and structural revenue shortfalls were revealed in Iowa and Pennsylvania. Airbnb increased the number of states in which it collects state-level taxes to 21. We also share interesting reads on state fiscal uncertainty, the tax experiences of Alaska and Wyoming, the future of taxing robots, and more!