Some ideas on addressing the city of Little Rock’s budget problem. Start butchering some sacred cows.
Taxes
Posted inArkansas Blog
State revenue collections for August narrowly miss forecast
The state’s year-to-date net available general revenue is still ahead of forecast by 1.1 percent, due to the stronger than expected revenue intake for July,
Posted inArkansas Blog
State tax collections beat forecast in first revenue report of new fiscal year
The Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration’s July revenue report released this morning shows July net available general revenue at $454.5 million — 2.4 percent above forecast
Posted inArkansas Blog
Donald Trump’s policy agenda is not popular
A national poll released this week from Quinnipiac suggests that Americans may be in disappointed with the actual policy agenda of Trump and the Republican Congress.
Posted inArkansas Blog
Voters across state say ‘tax me more’
In a scattering of special elections across Arkansas yesterday, voters were amenable to tax increases, including a big property tax vote for the Fayetteville public library.
Posted inArkansas Blog
Report: State income tax cuts a bad idea
This report will go straight to the trash should any of the ruling Republicans see it, but for the record from the Brookings Institute — state income tax cuts are of little value in spurring economic growth. Where they’ve been tried and failed, the unavoidable need to raise revenue has produced — not a return to a progressive income tax — but regressive taxes that hit poor people hardest.
Posted inArkansas Blog
State tax revenues dip in April
Partly on account of tax payment quirks, Arkansas revenue collections in April — traditionally the year’s biggest month — were down sharply from the same month in 2013, as forecasters had predicted. Sales and use tax collections, a good barometer of economic activity, were up 4.8 percent in the month.
Posted inArkansas Blog
The lobbying effort to stop Tax Day from being easier for taxpayers
I wrote last week the fact that the IRS could easily auto-prepare personal income taxes for American taxpayers. Auto-preparation could would save Americans $2 billion in tax preparation fees per year and 225 million hours per year in time spent preparing our taxes. But tax preparers like TurboTax make big profits off of the current hassle and form an unholy lobbying alliance with anti-tax crusaders like Grover Norquist, who want who want taxes to be as annoying as possible so that people will be more likely to oppose taxes. A great piece in ProPublica does some digging on this scandalous lobby’s efforts at an astroturf campaign against a simpler filing system, and reports that a lobbying group linked to Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, is involved in trying to encourage community leaders to write Op-eds and letters to Congress (all of them remarkably similar in content and language), claiming that “return-free filing” would hurt the poor.
Posted inArkansas Blog
Low-income Arkansans pay higher proportion of their income in state and local taxes than the rich do
Here’s another Tax Day chart, via Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families. When you factor in the impact of sales taxes, the lowest-income Arkansans pay a larger share of their income in state and local taxes than the super-rich do. Here’s their full report on this subject, from October. In related news, also worth checking out their report on income inequality in the state from last February.
Posted inArkansas Blog
Putting U.S. taxes in perspective
The folks at fivethirtyeight.com are celebrating Tax Day with charts and graphs! Above, taxes as a percentage of gross domestic product since 1965. Meanwhile, they also feature charts showing that income individual taxes in the U.S. are about average as a percentage of GDP compared to other nations measured by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), whereas corporate taxes are below average.