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Posts tagged
'Taxes'

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.
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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.
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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.

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.
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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.

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.
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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.

Organizations rally for tax fairness at Capitol

Representatives from Women's Action for New Directions (WAND) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), along with other local organizations, will speak on tax and budget fairness at a rally at the Capitol today at noon. The event, part of a series called "Truthful Tuesdays" coincides with the income tax deadline today.
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Tax day should be easier

With the deadline for filing income taxes fast approaching, it's a good time for a reminder that filing individual income taxes could be quick and basically automatic for most Americans. In most cases, the IRS has all the information it needs to do your taxes for you.

A tale of two states: Texas and Arkansas and the shale boom

Smart money says the Republican majority will override Gov. Mike Beebe's veto of a tax break on sand used in fracking for gas and oil. It's clearly an unconstitutional measure because it didn't get the two-thirds vote necessary to consider non-fiscal items in a budget session. But it's also bad policy and a sweetheart deal.
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February state tax take below forecast

February as another month of mixed results on state revenue, though the total still came in ahead of last year. The key monthly numbers, including poor results on sales taxes:

Corporate tax rates don't necessarily mean big tax bills

A new report from the Citizens for Tax Justice of the country's biggest corporations shows that many don't pay anything like the top 35 percent corporate income tax rate. Many pay nothing at all.
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