Author: tarek

One question that comes up in debates about the corporate income tax is who pays it. Even though the corporate tax is officially paid by corporations, all taxes are ultimately paid by actual people.

It is clear that the corporate tax is, in the short term, borne by the owners of capital — meaning it’s paid by the owners of corporate stocks and other business and investment assets because the tax reduces what corporations can pay out as dividends to their shareholders. But those who promote corporate tax breaks sometimes argue that in the long-term the tax is actually borne by labor — by workers who ultimately suffer lower wages or unemployment because the corporate tax allegedly pushes production activity offshore.

Most experts who have examined the question believe that investment is not entirely mobile in this way and that the vast majority of the corporate tax is borne by the owners of capital, who mostly (but not exclusively) have high incomes. This makes the corporate tax a very progressive tax.

For example, the Department of Treasury concluded that 82 percent of the corporate tax is borne by the owners of capital. According to Treasury, this results in the corporate income tax being distributed as illustrated in the table to the right, which shows that the richest one percent of Americans pay 43 percent of the tax while the richest 5 percent pay 58 percent of the tax. These figures were used by CTJ to estimate the distribution of tax increases resulting from corporate loophole-closing in our new comprehensive tax reform proposal.

Treasury’s findings are similar to those of other analysts. The Tax Policy Center, for example, has concluded that 80 percent of the corporate income tax is borne by the owners of capital.

Two weeks ago, the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), the official revenue estimators for Congress, announced that it would finally include corporate income taxes in its distributional tables showing the effects of proposed tax changes. This will make JCT’s analyses more consistent with other analyses (including CTJ’s), and will mean that lawmakers will no longer get a free pass in JCT’s distributional tables when they enact regressive corporate tax cuts.

In conjuction with its announcement, JCT published a report estimating that in the short-run all of any change in the corporate tax will benefit or burden owners of capital, while in the long-run 75 percent of a corporate tax change will affect owners of capital (and the rest will affect labor income).

JCT’s conclusion is not all that different from the conclusions of others, but some observers seem to think it is “news” and have misinterpreted its importance. For example, Bruce Bartlett, who typically has a lot of insightful things to say about taxes, wildly misinterprets JCT’s conclusion:

Politically, it is now easier to show that a cut in the corporate tax rate will have benefits that are broadly shared, especially by those with incomes below $30,000. Conversely, it means that the Obama administration’s plan to raise new revenue by closing corporate tax loopholes will have a harder time gaining traction, because much of the burden will fall on those with low incomes.

This is all wrong. Bartlett includes some tables from the JCT report in his piece but fails to include the table that actually matters, which is at the top of page 27 and is titled “Distribution of a $10 Billion per Year Increase in Corporate Income Taxes.” This table shows JCT’s estimates of how much taxes would go up for taxpayers at different income levels in each of the next 11 years. JCT’s figures are in millions of dollars, but with some simple arithmetic, we can calculate the share of a corporate tax increase paid by each of the income groups that JCT presents. We focus on the first and last year that JCT analyzes, to show both the immediate and longer-term impacts.

The result is the table below, which shows that under JCT’s assumptions, over half of a corporate income tax increase would be paid by people with income exceeding $200,000. Well over three-fourths would be paid by people with incomes exceeding $100,000. Only about 6 percent would be paid by the 55 percent of taxpayers earning less than $50,000, whose average tax increase from a $10 billion corporate tax hike would be only $7.

In other words, any provision that raises revenue by closing corporate tax loopholes will have a progressive impact, meaning it will increase the share of taxes paid by high-income people.

Low- and middle-income Americans will be hurt by proposals being debated like cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and proposals recently put into effect like sequestration of funds for Head Start. It would be far better for lawmakers to achieve whatever savings they think are necessary by closing corporate tax loopholes, because very little of the resulting tax increase would be paid by low- and middle-income Americans.

A headline in a publication read widely by tax experts (subscription only) this morning screamed “PwC Study: Effective Corporate Tax Rate Topped Statutory Rate From 2004 to 2010.”

The actual report, which was published in a rival publication this week (subscription only), provides three different ways of measuring effective corporate tax rates, and only one tells us anything about how our corporate tax system is working. That measure — the percentage of worldwide profits paid in worldwide taxes for corporations that were profitable from 2008 through 2010, was 22 percent, the study concludes.

This is not surprising at all. CTJ’s study of most of the Fortune 500 corporations that were consistently profitable from 2008 through 2010 found their effective U.S. federal corporate income tax rate on their U.S. profits to be 18.5 percent over that period. The PwC study finds that worldwide profits (not just U.S. profits) were subject to worldwide taxes (including U.S. federal and state taxes plus foreign taxes) of 22 percent.

These two findings are entirely compatible. The effective worldwide tax rate can be expected to be slightly higher than the effective U.S. tax rate that CTJ calculated because the CTJ study also found most of the corporations to pay higher taxes in the other countries where they did business, and because the worldwide rate includes state corporate taxes.

However, PwC’s report also includes two other, odd measures of corporate tax rates that are irrelevant to the policy debate, and tries to get reporters to focus on these irrelevant figures. One includes companies whether they were profitable are not in the years examined. Of course, corporations that are not profitable are not expected to pay the corporate income tax, which is a tax on profits. But including corporations with losses reduces the total amount of profits and makes the effective tax rate (taxes as a percentage of profits) appear much larger.

Another irrelevant measure used by the PwC study includes all corporations with positive taxable income. This measure leaves out corporations that actually are profitable but avoid taxes because of breaks (like depreciation breaks) that reduce their taxable income to below zero. This measure simply excludes the corporations that are most effective at dodging taxes.

The author of the PricewaterhouseCoopers report, Andrew Lyon, was called out by CTJ in 2011 for a report he wrote for the Business Roundtable claiming that U.S. corporations pay higher effective tax rates than corporations of other countries. It appears that this time around, his better angel compelled him to include a straightforward, relevant statistic even while he tries to divert readers’ attention to his report’s other, meaningless findings.

Citizens for Tax Justice released a detailed tax reform plan this week that accomplishes the goals we set out in an earlier report: raise revenue, enhance fairness, and reduce tax incentives for corporations to shift jobs and profits offshore.

A budget resolution approved by the House of Representatives in the spring called for a tax reform that raises no new revenue, while a budget resolution approved by the Senate called for $975 billion in new revenue over a decade. CTJ’s report on goals for tax reform explained why we need even more revenue than the Senate resolution calls for, and the plan we released this week would raise $2 trillion over a decade

Our proposal would accomplish this by ending some of the biggest breaks for wealthy individuals and corporations. The proposal includes the following reforms:

■ Repealing the special, low tax rates for capital gains and stock dividends, as well as the rule allowing accumulated capital gains to escape taxation when the owner of an asset dies.

■ Setting the top tax rate at 36 percent — which would be a significant tax increase on the wealthy because this rate would apply to the capital gains and stock dividends that mostly go to the richest Americans and which are now taxed at much lower rates.

■ Increasing the standard deduction by $2,200 for singles and twice that amount for married couples.

■ Replacing several “backdoor” taxes (like the Alternative Minimum Tax) with President Obama’s proposal to limit the tax savings of every dollar of deductions and exclusions to 28 cents.

■ Repealing several enormous corporate tax breaks, including the rule allowing American corporations to “defer” paying U.S. taxes on their offshore profits until those profits are officially brought to the U.S.

Read our tax reform reports:

Tax Reform Goals: Raise Revenue, Enhance Fairness, End Offshore Shelters
September 23, 2013

Tax Reform Details: An Example of Comprehensive Reform
October 23, 2013

Colorado’s Child Care Tax Credit would be expanded for low-income families under a bill approved by a special task force of legislators last week.  As the Colorado Center on Law and Policy explains (PDF), some Colorado households are actually too poor to benefit from the federal credit right now because it’s only available to families who make enough to have some income tax liability; if you don’t pay income taxes, you can’t receive any state tax credit.  This bill would fix that problem at the state level by letting families earning under $25,000 claim a credit equal to 25 percent of their child care expenses, regardless of what credit they did (or did not) receive at the federal level.

Montgomery County, Maryland continues to make progress toward restoring its Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) to its pre-recession level: 100 percent of the state’s EITC.  The enhancement was approved by a committee on Monday and will now go before the full council.  For more information, see our blog post on the history, and the benefits, of Montgomery County’s EITC.

Maine Governor Paul LePage is coming under fire for wildly inaccurate comments he made (which were secretly recorded) at a meeting of the Greater Portland chapter of the Informed Women’s Network.  Gaining him national attention, LePage told his audience  that “47 percent of able-bodied people in Maine don’t work,” a claim that is ridiculous.  At the same meeting LePage also said the following to justify his proposals to cut taxes for wealthy Mainers: “25 years ago Maine had about 2,000 millionaires. Maine has 400 now. New Hampshire at the time had about 500, right now they have 4,000. That’s the difference. That’s when you talk about prosperity and you talk about building an economy those are the things that you need to concern yourself with. So, I am looking at taxation as a big issue.”  Like his 47 percent claim, LePage evidently pulled these numbers out of thin air as data from the IRS do not back this statement. In fact, the number of tax returns with more than $1 million of income increased more in Maine (83%) than in New Hampshire (64%) between 1997 and 2011 (the years IRS data are available).

Some bad ideas just won’t die. Despite being rejected by the Pennsylvania House of Representatives by a vote of 138-59 last month, a proposal to eliminate school property taxes and reduce spending for schools is now being reconsidered by the state’s Senate. The bill, SB 76, replaces the property tax with higher sales and income taxes but then limits how much of the new revenue would flow to schools. The legislature’s own Independent Fiscal Office warned last week that the bill would create a $2.6 billion funding gap within five years. While reducing property taxes, which have been rising in recent years, may make sense (for low-income renters and fixed-income homeowners in particular), it should not be done at the expense of students, nor in the form of across-the-board cuts that also benefit big businesses. The House-passed HB 1189 at least ensured that the lost property tax revenues would be replaced with some other source, but neither bill addresses the longstanding problem of inadequate and unequal school funding in Pennsylvania.

Last week, the Illinois Supreme Court struck down a state law (commonly called the “Amazon law”) that would have helped solve some of the sales tax enforcement problems surrounding online shopping.  As things currently stand in Illinois (and most other states), traditional retailers with stores, warehouses, or actual employees in Illinois are required to collect  state sales taxes from their customers, while online retailers who don’t employ any Illinois residents (or have any other “physical presence”) are given a free pass.  Online shoppers are supposed to pay the sales tax directly to the state when e-retailers fail to collect it, but few shoppers actually do this in practice.

Illinois, along with nine other states, had tried to strengthen its sales tax enforcement by requiring more online retailers to collect the tax (specifically, those retailers partnering with Illinois-based “affiliates” to market their products).  But this court ruling strikes down Illinois’ law on the grounds that it treats companies partnering with online affiliates differently than companies who advertise in Illinois through traditional media.  According to a majority of the justices, this feature of Illinois’ “Amazon law” violates a federal law enacted in 2000 that bars “discriminatory taxes on electronic commerce.”

In his dissent, Justice Lloyd Karmeier points out that Illinois’ “Amazon law” didn’t actually impose any new taxes—it simply required a larger number of retailers to be involved in collecting and remitting sales taxes that are already due.  Karmeier went on to say that he would have upheld the law – in much the same way that New York’s highest court did with a similar law in that state earlier this year.

With Illinois’ and New York’s courts disagreeing on this issue, legal observers seem to think there’s a growing chance that the U.S. Supreme Court will consider the case next year.  But it’s a shame it’s come to this.  The Supreme Court already made clear over two decades ago that Congress has the authority to set up a more rational, nationwide policy for how states can tax purchase made over the Internet.  The U.S. Senate did exactly that this May with a bipartisan vote in favor of the Marketplace Fairness Act, but so far the U.S. House of Representatives has yet to act on it.  We presume it’s the political disagreements among activists and lobby groups that’s prevented the House from acting so far, but it’s increasingly urgent that states finally be allowed to resolve the mess that is tax collection for online shopping.

Cartoon by Monte Wolverton, available at and courtesy Cagle Cartoons.

Earlier this month, with an unexpected $100 million biennial budget surplus burning a hole in his pocket, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker proposed to use the one-time surplus to permanently cut local property taxes. In a whirlwind legislative session, a bipartisan group of Wisconsin lawmakers approved Walker’s tax cut with little opposition. Walker signed it into law over the weekend in a media-friendly event, with a red barn as the backdrop and children as nearby props.

The new law adds $100 million in state aid to local school districts over the next two years—which, due to the state’s strict local revenue limits, means that local governments receiving the new aid will be forced to reduce their property taxes dollar for dollar.

But there’s a hitch. The forecast $100 million surplus may be just a memory two years from now, but the new state aid will be permanently on the books. As the Wisconsin Budget Project (WBP) points out, using a one-time budget surplus to fund a permanent property tax cut is a recipe for long-term fiscal difficulties. Down the road, lawmakers will likely be forced to either hike state taxes or cut other areas of spending to pay for Walker’s tax cut. And “down the road” isn’t that far off: the Legislative Fiscal Bureau is already estimating a budget shortfall of about $725 million for the biennium starting in 2015.

Even worse, the new law will offer trivial tax breaks to homeowners, despite its huge price tag. The typical homeowner will see just $33 in property tax cuts over the next two years and many ordinary homeowners will see no cut at all. This is because the Governor’s plan will cut property taxes across the board, offering tax breaks to big corporations, shopping malls and vacation homes in addition to Wisconsin homeowners who happen to live in the right school districts.

In an attempt to disguise this campaign season ploy as a fiscally responsible plan, defenders of the new law argue that a new deal requiring Amazon.com to collect sales taxes in Wisconsin will help pay for the cut. But the estimated $30 million a year from that deal is not “new revenue,” and it’s already got a purpose—it’s legally-owed sales tax revenue that should already have been helping to fund schools, roads and medical care for years.

One of the few responsible legislators who voted against the tax bill offered some illuminating observations. Noting that it amounts to less than a dollar a month for the average home owner, State Senator Tim Cullen said that this trumpeted “tax relief” was aimed at nothing more than ensuring Governor Walker’s re-election. “That at the end of the day is what this is all about — $100 million of property tax relief. Nice headline.” More specifically, many share the view that the Governor was more interested in scoring political points than promoting good tax policy, and it’s a shame so many members of his legislature willingly played along.

In his reelection campaign, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has been touting his record as a self-proclaimed fiscal conservative, bragging that “not one tax has been raised since I’ve been governor.” Many low-income New Jersey families would disagree. That is because Christie cut the state’s property and earned income tax credits, two critical anti-poverty measures for low-income workers, during his first term.

On property taxes, Christie boasts that he “successfully implemented a 2-percent property tax cap.” But many low- and moderate-income homeowners actually pay more now in property taxes than before the cap took effect. That is because he reduced funding for the Homestead Benefit and Senior Freeze programs, costing working families hundreds of millions of dollars. That is one reason why the public’s view of Christie’s handling of the property tax issue is so low.

On income taxes, Christie reduced the state’s EITC by 20 percent in 2010, costing 1.5 million workers a total of $100 million in tax credits over the last two years. The governor then refused to restore the cuts unless he got his way on an across-the-board income tax cut. In fact, he twice vetoed legislation that would restore the EITC, effectively holding low-income New Jersey workers hostage to his demands.

In contrast, Christie’s opponent, Barbara Buono, has promised to “restore New Jersey’s Earned Income Tax Credit and protect property tax relief for the families who need it most.” At the same time, Buono is supporting a millionaire’s tax that Governor Christie rejected (vetoing it three times) in order to fill in revenues needed for education in particular, which has been severely cut during Christie’s tenure.

A candidate for governor who says, as Buono does, that tax credits and incentives work best when targeted is one who better understands the role of taxes in the economy and budget than one committed to across-the-board income tax cuts (which do zero for a state’s economy and always benefit the wealthiest instead of taxpayers who actually need relief).   

Sixteen days after parts of the federal government were shut down because House Republicans refused to approve a spending plan unless it defunded or delayed health care reform and after coming close to causing a breach of the federal debt limit that would cause a catastrophic default, Congress and the President have enacted legislation to address both problems — for a while.

The deal does not change health care reform in any significant way and provides appropriations to keep the federal government running through January 15. It also suspends the debt ceiling until February 7, likely giving the Treasury until sometime in March before it requires another change in the debt ceiling.

As we have already explained, President Obama and Congressional Democrats had already more or less accepted the level of spending demanded by Republicans (a level of spending that assumed sequestration or other cuts equally large would stay in place) at the beginning of the debate over the continuing resolution (CR) that Congress needed to enact to keep the government running. But House Republicans demanded eliminating or delaying the health care reform law — even though it is funded entirely separately from the programs covered by the CR.

Of course, this all could happen again. The government could partially shut down again on January 15 if spending legislation is not enacted, and the U.S. could default on its debt in March if legislation is not enacted to raise the debt ceiling. Hopefully, Congressional Republicans will accept President Obama’s stance that the debt ceiling is simply not something that should be negotiated at all because a debt default would be so calamitous for the U.S. and the world economy. But there will still be plenty to argue about when Congress turns to the spending legislation needed to avoid another shutdown.

Budget Conference Panel Should Raise Taxes or Go Home

The deal that Congress and the President just enacted sets up a process for Congress to work out its differences and avoid another shutdown, at least in theory. The deal calls for the House and Senate to form a conference committee to work out the differences between the fiscal year 2014 budget resolutions approved in the spring by each chamber, and to report an agreement by December 13.

But the most likely scenario is that the committee will come to no agreement at all by December 13, and Congress eventually will enact another continuing resolution that keeps federal spending at the current harmfully anemic level.

Unlike the President’s debt commission in 2010 (the “Simpson-Bowles commission”) and the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction in 2011 (the “Super Committee”), this panel is the normal conference committee that traditionally works out differences between House-passed and Senate-passed bills.

But it’s very unlikely that the committee can come to any such agreement. The Senate budget resolution is relatively moderate, but the House budget resolution is so ideological that it makes compromise seem impossible.

The House budget resolution, nicknamed the “Ryan Plan” after House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, calls for overhauling the tax code without raising any new revenue and calls for huge program cuts to balance the budget. The Senate budget resolution, crafted by Senate Budget Committee Chair Patty Murray, would raise $975 billion over a decade, bringing revenue to an extra 0.7 percent of the economy, and also calls for $975 billion in spending cuts.

We have pointed out before that the level of tax revenue projected to be collected under current law (which has recently been adjusted downward from 19.1 to 18.5 percent of the economy) would not have covered federal spending in any but a handful of the past thirty years. It is also wildly unrealistic to assume, as the Ryan plan does, that the deficit can be eliminated without raising revenue from this level.

This is why the spending cuts included in the Ryan plan are so draconian that they involve eliminating health insurance for millions of Americans and making massive cuts to safety net programs for poor and working families.

A CTJ report explains that the few details that the Ryan plan does set out for tax reform could not possibly be enacted without giving millionaires an average tax cut of at least $200,000, while requiring people at lower income levels to make up the difference.

The two resolutions also take different approaches to the deficit. The Senate resolution reduces it but does not eliminate it entirely, which is appropriate given that the projected short-term deficit has dropped sharply. Paul Ryan’s schizophrenic view that deficits are a huge problem but revenue increases cannot be used to address them is reflected in the House resolution’s reliance on enormous, harmful cuts in entitlements and safety net programs to balance the budget.

In theory, Murray and Ryan, who will co-chair the new budget conference committee, could come up with a compromise that does some good, like ending the damage done by sequestration. But any “deal” or “compromise” that fails to raise tax revenue from wealthy individuals and corporations should be rejected. 

Responding to growing international pressure over his country’s role in facilitating international tax avoidance, Ireland’s Minister of Finance, Michael Noonan, proposed a new measure that would end the ability of companies to avoid taxes by incorporating in his country without declaring any country of residence for tax purposes. The move comes after a Senate investigation in the U.S. that revealed Apple’s massive tax avoidance involving subsidiaries in Ireland.

But this move will not make any difference in the ability of Apple and other companies to avoid Irish, and by extension, other countries’ taxes. The law, as proposed, would continue to allow a company incorporated in Ireland to select any country to be its “residence,” the place where it is technically managed. In other words, a subsidiary company incorporated in Ireland can declare a tax haven as its residence and pay zero taxes on its profits and on profits funneled to it from related companies in other countries.

In fact, this approach is already being used by Google, which reportedly routed $12 billion in royalty payments to Bermuda, an infamous tax haven, using the “Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich” technique. This strategy involves shifting profits (on paper) through subsidiaries that are shell companies in several jurisdictions until they are officially in an Irish shell company that legally “resides” in a country like Bermuda or the Cayman Islands which has no corporate income tax. The U.S. and many other countries have rules that would immediately tax certain payments made directly into a shell company in Bermuda or the Cayman Islands, so this complicated strategy takes advantage of the treaties between Ireland, the Netherlands, and many other countries that waive those taxes.

While it would fail to block this sort of tax avoidance, Ireland’s new proposal has succeeded so far in generating headlines that suggest the country is taking action and doing its part in international efforts to crack down on tax avoidance. Most reporting does, however, note somewhere in the text of the article, if not the headline, the fact that the change would likely have no material effect on tax avoidance (unlike some of the fumbled reporting on the end of the Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into Apple).

The leaders of the U.S. Senate investigation into Apple’s tax practices, Senators Carl Levin and John McCain, noted in a statement that in order for Ireland to demonstrate that it’s truly “ready to close the door on these egregious corporate tax abuses,” it must ensure that the new rules truly prevent companies from excluding substantial income from the Irish corporate tax by declaring residency in a tax haven. In other words, unless this recent proposal is followed up with changes that would actually impact tax avoidance, then it may be nothing more than a PR move.

Congress can end Apple’s and other U.S. companies’ avoidance of U.S. taxes right now, without waiting for Ireland to do the right thing. The best way is to simply repeal the rule that allows American corporations to defer paying (PDF) U.S. taxes on their offshore profits.  American corporations only use gimmicks like the “Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich” so that they can defer (for years or forever) U.S. taxes on profits they claim are earned offshore. If Congress fails to repeal deferral, it can at least curb the worst abuses of deferral by enacting the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act which Senator Levin has introduced.

Nebraska’s Tax Modernization Committee, which we promised to keep tabs on in July, is scheduled to hold its final public hearings this week. But rather than wait to hear what the panel has to say, Governor Dave Heineman decided to renew his calls for lower property and income taxes. While some have argued that Nebraska’s property taxes are too high, slashing property taxes without increasing state aid to local governments would put significant strain on vital local services. Today, Nebraska ranks 43rd nationally in the amount of state aid it provides to local governments, and 49th in the aid it gives to schools. If Governor Heineman succeeds in his quest to cut state taxes, increasing local aid will become even more difficult. The Open Sky Policy Institute has issued thoughtful recommendations on this and other issues facing the Committee.

If you’re wondering whether you should put any stock in the Tax Foundation’s newest “Business Tax Climate Index,” the answer is No.  For starters, Good Jobs First has shown that, contrary to popular belief, the Tax Foundation’s rankings aren’t a very good predictor of how much a business would actually pay in taxes if it were located in any given state.  And now Governing magazine has taken a critical look at the rankings in a new article, and concludes that states earning high marks from the Tax Foundation don’t actually have stronger job markets or higher medium wages.

U.S. News & World Report is running an opinion piece by Carl Davis from our partner organization, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), highlighting the fact that the federal gas tax has not been raised in exactly 20 years – and has been losing value ever since. The essay draws heavily from research that ITEP published late last month, and concludes that “it’s time for our elected officials to accept that keeping the gas tax cryogenically frozen at 18.4 cents per gallon is costing Americans a lot more than it’s helping them.”

West Virginia is thinking about how best to use the tax revenues it expects to collect from sales of its natural gas resources. The Associated Press reports that “[f]or decades, coal from West Virginia’s vast deposits was mined, loaded on rail cars and hauled off without leaving behind a lasting trust fund financed by the state’s best-known commodity. Big coal’s days are waning, but now a new bonanza in the natural gas fields has state leaders working to ensure history doesn’t repeat itself.” According to the AP, the state’s Senate president, Jeff Kessler, is looking to use some of the severance tax revenues on oil and natural gas to create an enduring trust fund, as other states with significant natural resources have done. “His goal: a cushion of funds long after the gas is depleted to buoy an Appalachian mountain state chronically vexed by poverty, high joblessness, and cycles of boom and bust.”

Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families Executive Director, Rich Huddleston, was one of four Arkansas leaders invited to contribute to Talk Business Arkansas magazine with ideas for how to “construct a fairer state tax code.” His proposal (citing ITEP data) is here, and begins: “The goal of any good tax system is to raise enough revenue to fund critical public investments that improve well-being of children and families while also promoting economic growth and prosperity.”