• Paying Taxes to the Boss explains how 2,700 companies in 16 states are pocketing their workers’ state income tax payments rather than handing them over to the government.  Good Jobs First examines this entirely legal tax giveaway in a recent report.
  • Here’s an important op-ed about the consequences of a bill moving in the Minnesota legislature that would eventually eliminate state business property taxes – at a cost of $7 billion the state can’t afford.  Wayne Cox from Minnesotans for Tax Justice writes that the bill is “sort of like a family that doesn’t know how it is going to pay its bills and decides the solution is to quit one of its jobs.”
  • Anti-tax activists were trying to exploit Missouri’s broken ballot initiative process, but now a judge has dealt an enormous blow to advocates of a disastrous plan to eliminate that state’s income tax; this radical scheme now has a slim chance of getting on the November ballot.
  • This is a smart article from an Indiana paper describing a phenomena we’ve talked about before – fewer gambling revenues are generated when neighboring states open casinos and compete for the same customers.
  • The Birmingham News cites a recent report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) to help explain how the short-sighted design of Alabama’s gas tax has contributed to the state’s transportation funding problems.  The state’s Transportation Director sums it up: “we have both a financing mechanism and a gauge that is 20 years old … It doesn’t work and that is obvious.”