If voters approve Amendment 5 on the primary election ballot this August, Missouri policymakers must pass legislation to gradually phase out the state’s income tax while choosing how to pay for this goal.
Retail prices make poor targets for excise tax policy, often reflecting factors that have little to do with the underlying reasons for which an excise tax is levied in the first place. Unfortunately, the World Health Organization (WHO) has a growing preference for using tax share of retail price (tax incidence) as a primary policy target.
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Poland is proposing to broaden and raise its digital services tax (DST) from 1.5 percent to 3 percent. Because DSTs tax revenues, not profits, a company with a 10 percent profit margin would face a 30 percent effective tax rate on digital services provided in Poland.
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Who really pays for European welfare states? Many assume the answer is obvious: high-income earners contribute while low-income earners benefit. However, that assumption is only partly true, and often misleading.
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One of the arguments in favor of the FairTax is that it would do a better job of taxing the underground economy than the income tax it is intended to replace.
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The overall U.S. tax and transfer system is overwhelmingly progressive, and understanding the extent—and source—of that progressivity is essential for lawmakers considering the trade-offs associated with each tax policy decision.
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Tax burdens rose across the country as pandemic-era economic changes caused taxable income, activities, and property values to rise faster than net national product. Tax burdens in 2020, 2021, and 2022 are all higher than in any other year since 1978.
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The Biden administration has targeted U.S. businesses, including corporations and passthrough entities, to raise revenue to fund new spending. However, individual taxpayers across America will end up footing the bill.
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The Biden administration has pledged to not raise taxes on anyone earning less than $400,000 a year. However, the administration’s corporate tax proposals would likely violate that pledge, given that corporations are comprised of people who also might earn less than $400,000.
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New Yorkers faced the highest burden, with 14.1 percent of income in the state going to state and local taxes. Connecticut (12.8 percent) and Hawaii (12.7 percent) followed.
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Increasing the corporate tax rate is often offered as a solution to income inequality because higher-income individuals tend to own more corporate shares than others and may bear the burden of a tax increase on corporate income.
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Recent empirical evidence shows that workers bear upwards of 70 percent of the corporate income tax burden, much more than popular tax models claim, which make errors in how they account for super-normal returns and the openness of our economy.
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