Guest Post: Five Findings: Tax-cut plan will harm North Carolina’s Competitive Position

Thanks to Alexandra Sirota from the North Carolina Tax and Budget Center for guest posting for us about the budget debate in North Carolina. For more information we urge you to visit the North Carolina Tax and Budget Center’s website. 

By: Alexandra Sirota, Director North Carolina Tax and Budget Center

Due to the speed at which passage of the budget bill is moving, we’re highlighting here five important findings from our analysis of the proposed tax-cut plan.

The Budget & Tax Center will release a more detailed analysis of the tax plan in the next day, so stay tuned. 

The bottom line: yet again policymakers chose to cut taxes — a strategy that doesn’t address North Carolina’s real economic challenges. By doing so they undercut the foundations of what has proven to be economy-boosting public investments. Rather than debate what is needed so every child in North Carolina receives a high quality education, for example, policymakers narrowed their choices by cutting taxes to say it’s either teachers or textbooks; smart technology in the classroom or a teacher assistant; a one-time bonus or bringing teachers closer to the national average in pay.

North Carolina can’t afford to debate what a successful state looks like at the margins. The bar should be higher. We need to build on the investments that have made our state great and follow the time-tested better pathway to a strong economy that works for everyone.

Here is why the tax plan fails to meet North Carolina’s high standards of fiscal responsibility and will fail to put the state in a competitive position against our neighbors and the nation:

• It’s a big revenue loser. No surprise here — but the impacts of that revenue loss aren’t fully accounted for in this two-year budget. That is because policymakers designed the tax changes to kick in down the road when future policymakers will need to contend with an even greater gap between resources and public needs, like a growing number of students and the inability to move teachers to the national average in pay.

• The wealthiest keep getting the biggest breaks. The move to cut the top state income tax rate to 5.499 percent from 5.7 percent appears to only serve the ideological commitment to income tax cuts. By design, it doesn’t address the fact that low- and middle-income taxpayers already pay more as a share of their income in state and local taxes than the wealthiest taxpayers do. That gap will even widen a bit under this plan. Just slightly more than one-third of taxpayers with income below $20,000 get a tax cut at the same time that 99 percent of those with income greater than $423,000 do.

• The sales tax base expansion should not be used to pay for income tax and should include a state Earned Income Tax Credit. Increasing the goods and services subject to sales tax is important to keep up with today’s economy and provide much-needed revenue.  But relying more on the sales tax while reducing the income tax is a step in the wrong direction. It threatens the balance provided by two taxes that perform differently in different economic circumstances. In the long term North Carolina’s revenue system will be more subject to erosion in economic downturns – just when public needs tend to be the greatest. Equally important is that using an expanded sales tax to pay for costly income tax cuts fails to account for the reality that the lower one’s income the higher percentage of it they pay in sales taxes. A $500 increase in the standard deduction is insufficient to address the greater tax load that low- and middle-income taxpayers will pay. Again, the wealthiest get the biggest benefit.

• The corporate income tax rate will definitely drop to 3 percent at some point next year. Changes to the language driving the reduction mean that revenue collections don’t have to meet the low revenue threshold set, a bar that they will likely surpass given the national economic recovery, by the end of Fiscal Year 2016. Whenever they reach that threshold, the rate will be reduced resulting in an additional $350 million in lost revenue for public schools and targeted economic development efforts beginning in the second year.  Moreover, changes to the way in which corporations profits are subject to tax will also change such that multistate corporations will only pay tax based on the share of their national profits generated from sales to North Carolina consumers and no longer need to account for their property or payroll.

• Allocating sales tax revenue to local communities under the proposed complex formula won’t make them whole. Many questions remain about how the complicated formula for sending sales tax revenue to localities will be implemented — and how much money will be involved. Is it just the revenue anticipated from expanding the sales tax? Or could revenue generated from sales tax also be in the mix if anticipated revenue collections from broadening the sales tax fall short?  Importantly too, the roughly $84.8 million identified is unlikely to sufficiently change the dynamics in rural communities where water & sewer infrastructure needs persist, main street revitalization and support to existing businesses to expand are needed and job training and pathways require regional connections. A vision and policy agenda for rural economic development cannot be achieved with a state tax code that falls short.

The proposed tax plan proposed is not reform. It won’t help the state’s economic position. It has been proven over time that tax cuts don’t drive significant job creation or improve wages. They can’t ensure that economic activity happens in communities that are being left behind by current economic growth.

What tax cuts do is reduce the ability of the state to build a foundation for a strong economy. That is crystal clear. The harm to public schools, health, the justice system and economic development from adoption of a strategy that doesn’t work will be felt by us all.