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Here’s a huge tax fairness victory in Iowa. The state Senate voted unanimously to increase the Earned Income Tax Credit from 7 to 13 percent of the federal credit to help working families make ends meet.
Matt Gardner, Executive Director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), blogs about lessons for Georgia from a new ITEP report on the economies of states with and without income taxes. Gardner writes that Georgia lawmakers “wanting to join the non-income tax club are simply idolizing the wrong states. Most states without income taxes are doing worse than average … and the states with the highest top tax rates are actually outperforming them.”
Also in Georgia, anti-tax guru Grover Norquist is weighing in on collecting taxes on internet sales, warning that it is a violation of his group’s “no new tax” pledge to vote for legislation requiring online retailers to collect sales taxes on purchases. But the fact is, Georgians who shop online do, by law, have to pay the sales tax on those purchases if the e-retailer does not collect the tax, but the requirement is basically unenforceable. Collecting taxes legally due is not a tax increase.
Missouri lawmakers are falling all over themselves to come up with revenues without “raising taxes” because the trust fund that pays for veterans’ services in the state is insolvent. Silly “non tax” ideas being floated by legislators include casino entrance fees and a special lottery, which have already proven to be unsustainable revenue sources for veterans’ and other programs. Missouri is notorious for its failure to tackle serious tax reform; will a backlog of military veterans in need of care give lawmakers incentive to do the right thing?
Bills in both the Iowa House and Senate are advancing that would finally raise the state’s long stagnant gas tax rate. ITEP recently found that Iowa hasn’t raised its gas tax rate in 22 years, and that since that time the tax has lost $337 million in yearly value relative to rising transportation construction costs.