As fiscal year 2023 draws to a close, North Carolina’s House and Senate have each passed their own versions of the biennial budget for fiscal years 2024-25. While legislative leaders have generally agreed to overall spending levels, negotiations remain ongoing to resolve different approaches to tax policy.
Making expensing permanent is especially important now, when the economy is threatened with a recession and inflation remains high.
Rather than continue down the path of growing debt, lawmakers should craft a comprehensive solution. International experience cautions against tax-based fiscal consolidations, but modest tax increases may be part of a successful debt reduction package.
Adopting the sound tax reforms still pending in Santa Fe is an opportunity for New Mexico to keep up with the pack or risk falling further behind.
As Kansas legislators consider additional tax policy changes this legislative session, they should prioritize economic growth and a structurally sound tax code.
While hoping for inflation’s continued decline, policymakers should finish the job and index the tax code to prepare for future bouts of high inflation and as a contingency in case it takes longer to defeat elevated inflation than expected.
At the end of 2022, prices were 14.6 percent higher than they were two years prior. That’s the fastest inflation rate over any two calendar years since the stagflation era of the late 1970s. State policymakers are understandably interested in bringing any tools at their disposal to bear on the problem. And many of them are reaching for tax policy solutions.
History is clear. Lowering budget deficits via spending restraint frees resources for additional private output and jobs. Lowering them by raising taxes on business investment and labor services makes it harder to dis-inflate without a recession.
In what is already a year of significant bipartisan focus on tax relief, 2022 is launching something of a flat tax revolution by reforming income taxes.
As we near this year’s “lame duck” session of Congress, there has been renewed interest in reforming the child tax credit as part of a tax deal. Our new analysis highlights the trade-offs that policymakers will face