Taxation
Ian Donnis points to the Campaign for Rhode Island’s Priorities, who are going to “call on the Governor to bring close scrutiny to Rhode Island’s hidden budget of expensive tax expenditures!” More on that in a minute, but first a quick aside: Ian doesn’t think we at AR pay enough attention to “corporate welfare.” Well,…
Rep. Charles Rangel (D, NY), Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee is looking to overhaul the current tax system. He’s got all sorts of ideas, summarized in this story (or this PDF summary), but I just want to point out to one portion: Middle and upper-middle income families would benefit under the plan…
Poverty Institute Executive Director Kate Brewster says the solution to the budget crunch is higher taxes, not cutting the budget: • Restore the tax on long-term capital gains and freeze the “alternative flat tax,” both of which primarily benefit a handful of very wealthy taxpayers, many of whom are not even Rhode Island residents. There is…
Chris Edwards at CATO illustrates how Americans currently share the tax burden (h/t). First, the shiny graph: Then Edwards’ analysis: 1990 was before the Clinton tax increases of 1993. 2000 was after the modest tax cuts of 1997, but before the Bush tax cuts of 2001. 2005 was with the Bush tax cuts in place.…
The sun rose and somewhere a dog bit a man. And the Tax Foundation has new numbers {PDF} that paint the usual grim picture for Rhode Island. Here are some bullet points taken from the ProJo story on the matter (all are quotes from the piece): The Tax Foundation based its rankings on five taxes:…
I’ll add the most recent Tax Foundation analysis (released October 5) to the discussion about incomes and tax rates being batted around in the comments section…This year’s numbers show that both the income share earned by the top 1 percent and the tax share paid by the top 1 percent have reached all-time highs. In…
Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick visited Rhode Island last evening to discuss his state’s triple-casino proposal, but Roland Benjamin thinks there are better ways for Rhode Island to compete with Massachusetts than by expanding gambling here… Quite a stir regarding the “not quite dead yet” Casino discussion. The debate reopens in response to rumblings from Massachusetts…
Elizabeth Gudrais has an article in today’s Projo on the National Conference of State Legislatures’ annual state budget survey ($$ required to view the original). This year’s study ranks Rhode Island #1 in the country in terms of tax increases between this year and last. The Projo article contains none-too-surprising reactions from the usual suspects;…
While we’re on the subject of pensions, the reason that many people believe that the public sector needs to move away from defined-benefit pension plans to defined contribution type retirement plans (and that the government has to move away from a defined benefit Social Security system) goes beyond the rationale that “it’s the way the…