July 16, 2013 03:17 PM By Meg Wiehe, Deputy Director at ITEP | Permalink | After months and months of speculation and deliberation on numerous versions of “tax reform,” political leaders in the Tar Heel state reached an agreement this week on a tax package that will leave the state short of more than $700 […]
July 11, 2013 04:59 PM By Citizens for Tax Justice Staff | Permalink | We still don’t know what the U.S. House of Representatives is going to do about immigration reform. The Senate passed a bill with a solid majority, and that legislation enjoys support from the Chamber of Commerce and the labor movement, from […]
July 11, 2013 04:49 PM By Meg Wiehe, Deputy Director at ITEP | Permalink | As the battle over immigration reform shifts to the U.S. House of Representatives, some opponents of reform continue to focus on the alleged costs of reform. Yet, as a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report reminds us, immigration reform involves […]
July 11, 2013 02:00 PM By Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy Staff | Permalink | Some lawmakers and advocates like to complain when gasoline tax revenues are used to fund public transit, but new research by Berkeley economist Michael L. Anderson shows that drivers benefit hugely from the existence of transit. Anderson’s paper shows […]
July 3, 2013 12:03 PM By Richard Phillips, Senior Policy Analyst at ITEP | Permalink | While President Barack Obama presented a myriad of new proposals to combat climate change in his new Climate Action Plan (PDF), one of the most striking aspects of the plan is that it does not contain any proposal for […]
July 1, 2013 05:10 PM By Citizens for Tax Justice Staff | Permalink | Legislative sessions are ending, new fiscal years are beginning and Governors in both Ohio and Wisconsin signed budgets into law this weekend. Despite a series of Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) analyses published by Policy Matters Ohio (PMO) which […]
July 1, 2013 05:01 PM By Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy Staff | Permalink | The Philadelphia Inquirer reports on a poll showing that most Pennsylvanians care more about the quality of their schools than about keeping their tax bills low: “The poll found that in order to restore $1 billion in state aid […]
July 1, 2013 02:51 PM By Citizens for Tax Justice Staff | Permalink | Senators Max Baucus and Orrin Hatch, the Democratic chairman and the ranking Republican of the Senate Finance Committee, have invited all members of the Senate to begin the debate over tax reform without any basic agreement on how much revenue is […]
June 27, 2013 03:26 PM By Richard Phillips, Senior Policy Analyst at ITEP | Permalink | The Supreme Court’s decisions striking down the law banning federal recognition of gay marriages, as well as the Court’s decision to not rule on the California ban on gay marriage that the state government has decided not to enforce, […]
June 27, 2013 03:10 PM By Citizens for Tax Justice Staff | Permalink | In the debate over offshore tax avoidance by multinational corporations, one proposal that should not be controversial is country-by-country reporting. The U.S. government does collect information on what profits corporations claim to earn and what taxes they pay in each country, […]
June 27, 2013 12:09 PM By Carl Davis, Research Director at ITEP | Permalink | The federal government has gone almost two decades without raising its gas tax, but that doesn’t mean the states have to stand idly by and watch their own transportation revenues dwindle. On Monday July 1, eight states will increase their […]
June 26, 2013 01:35 PM By Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy Staff | Permalink | The Commonwealth Institute of Virginia explains the folly of cutting state corporate income taxes – a move endorsed by Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli, among others. The Institute points out that corporations are already paying a smaller share of state […]
June 25, 2013 12:20 PM By Carl Davis, Research Director at ITEP | Permalink | Throughout most of its existence, online retailer Amazon.com aggressively avoided having to collect state sales taxes from its customers. Its 5 to 10 percent price advantage relative to local retailers who have to collect the tax wasn’t something that Amazon […]
June 25, 2013 11:55 AM By Citizens for Tax Justice Staff | Permalink | Congressman John Delaney, a Democrat from Maryland, has proposed to allow American corporations to bring a limited amount of offshore profits back to the U.S. (to “repatriate” these profits) without paying the U.S. corporate tax that would normally be due. This […]
June 24, 2013 01:10 PM By Citizens for Tax Justice Staff | Permalink | California Shows that Geographically Targeted Tax Incentives Don’t Work Last week, the New York State Legislature overwhelmingly passed START-UP New York (previously known as Tax-Free NY). The approval came after nearly a month of Governor Cuomo’s state-wide campus PR tour where […]
June 20, 2013 04:20 PM By Richard Phillips, Senior Policy Analyst at ITEP | Permalink | On Tuesday, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that the immigration reform bill currently making its way through the US Senate will actually decrease the deficit by $197 billion between 2014-2023. The report’s findings are at odds with […]
June 20, 2013 02:50 PM By Matt Gardner, Senior Fellow at ITEP | Permalink | Last year we wrote about an unwelcome mini-trend in state corporate tax policy: the creation of “neo-vouchers,” tax breaks for businesses that donate money to private-school scholarship funds. At the time, advocates for these neo-vouchers were making the (not very […]
June 19, 2013 05:36 PM By Meg Wiehe, Deputy Director at ITEP | Permalink | The tax reform/tax cut debate in the North Carolina capital continues into another dramatic week. Yesterday, Senate President Phil Berger pulled his chamber’s version of reform from the floor calendar, before Senators held their final vote on the plan, amidst […]
June 19, 2013 01:59 PM By Citizens for Tax Justice Staff | Permalink | Remember the 2011 Hollywood blockbuster The Descendants, starring George Clooney? Odds are yes, as it was nominated for 5 Academy Awards. Perhaps less memorable were the ending credits and the special thank you to the Hawaii Film Office who administers the […]
June 19, 2013 12:58 PM By Citizens for Tax Justice Staff | Permalink | On June 18, the leaders of the G-8 countries meeting in Northern Ireland released a declaration that included cracking down on the use of shell corporations for tax evasion and principles related to this goal, while the White House released a […]
June 18, 2013 03:43 PM By Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy Staff | Permalink | In disturbing news that shouldn’t surprise anyone who looked at the math, Wisconsin’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau is anticipating that the state will experience a $500 million structural shortfall in 2017 if the bill approved by the Joint Finance Committee […]
June 13, 2013 04:10 PM By Meg Wiehe, Deputy Director at ITEP | Permalink | With help from ITEP’s number crunchers, the North Carolina Budget and Tax Center is busy setting the record straight about who wins and who loses under a myriad of tax reform proposals moving quickly through North Carolina’s legislature (and causing […]
June 13, 2013 02:54 PM By Kelly Davis, Assistant Director of Communications | Permalink | During the 2013 legislative session, our state policy team has been observing the tenor of the Kansas tax cut debate with some concern. Too many media accounts have focused primarily on the sales tax and whether the temporary hike to […]
June 13, 2013 01:44 PM By Citizens for Tax Justice Staff | Permalink | On Thursday morning, a hearing was held on “Tax Havens, Base Erosion and Profit-Shifting,” by the House Ways and Means Committee, whose chairman, Dave Camp (R-MI), has proposed several types of “territorial” tax systems that CTJ has long argued would make […]
June 13, 2013 01:26 PM By Richard Phillips, Senior Policy Analyst at ITEP | Permalink | While Citizens for Tax Justice has been taking a deep dive into offshore-tax sheltering and why the corporate tax is indispensable, some friends and allies have put out a series of reports over the past week on the economic […]