The Heartland Institute

State government tax collections in Fiscal 2011 showed strong year-over-year growth compared to fiscal 2010 collections, according to Census Bureau data released April 12. Fiscal 2011 ended on June 30, 2011 for 46 states. Fiscal 2011 total state government tax collections increased by 8.9 percent. Personal income tax grew by ...

President Obama this week re-launched his advocacy for a "Buffett Rule," which maintains that no millionaire should pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than a middle-class family. On Tuesday, the National Economic Council issued a white paper justifying the Buffett Rule as a “basic principle of tax fairness.” Yet ...

Sometime in the next few days, Florida Gov. Rick Scott will have to decide whether to sign or veto HB 7117 , a multipronged renewable energy and conservation bill that provides tax credits for renewable energy technology investment and renewable fuel infrastructure. If signed and implemented, the bill would cost taxpayers $16 ...

The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1992 decision in Quill Corporation v. North Dakota protects out-of-state businesses in the Internet era from overreaching by revenue-hungry states. The Court’s decision prevents a state from forcing an out-of-state business to serve as the state’s sales tax collector if the business has no physical ...

Tax Freedom Day® 2012 arrives on April 17 this year, four days later than last year due to higher federal income and corporate tax collections. That means Americans will work 107 days into the year, from January 1 to April 17, to earn enough money to pay this year’s combined 29.2 percent average federal, state, and local ...

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has proposed raising the city’s 2 cent tax on beverage containers to 5 cents. She said during a recent City Council meeting the proposal is part of her Better Schools Initiative to build new schools. “We have identified three new funding streams, including the bottle tax, that will begin ...

If President Obama and Congress fail to act this year, an enormous, unprecedented tax increase will fall on American taxpayers starting on January 1, 2013. The Washington Post called the looming tax increase “Taxmageddon,” and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke called it a “massive fiscal cliff.” This impending tax increase ...

Tax Freedom Day® 2012 arrives on April 17 this year, four days later than last year due to higher federal income and corporate tax collections. That means Americans will work 107 days into the year, from January 1 to April 17, to earn enough money to pay this year’s combined 29.2 percent federal, state, and local tax bill ...

Low-income working families in New York State receive a significant annual wage supplement through the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which is available to eligible filers of federal, state and New York City income tax returns. More than 1.6 million households—nearly one out of every five in the Empire State—claimed total EITC ...

With transportation coffers barely able to maintain highways, let alone adding new capacity to relieve congestion, many transportation economists and urban planners have concluded that the best solution to U.S. freeway congestion is to implement variable pricing on all congested freeways. At the same time, many political scientists ...

As part of the Obama administration’s quest for additional revenue, they have proposed a tax aimed at business owners. While the Enterprise Value Tax (EVT) is no longer an immediate threat, the administration has made it clear that they have a deep interest in increasing the tax burden on business owners and job creators ...

With transportation coffers barely able to maintain highways, let alone adding new capacity to relieve congestion, many transportation economists and urban planners have concluded that the best solution to U.S. freeway congestion is to implement variable pricing on all congested freeways. At the same time, many political scientists ...

On April 1 the United States earned the dubious distinction of having the highest statutory corporate tax rate of any industrialized nation. This happened because on April 1 Japan lowered its corporate tax rate, moving the United States to the top of the list with a federal government rate of 35 percent. Most states also ...

This election cycle, some American politicians have insisted that, in order to solve the government debt problem, millionaires and billionaires must pay their "fair share," and bankers and financiers must be "held accountable." Their European counterparts are far ahead of them in this regard. François Hollande, whom polls predict ...

To avoid high U.S. corporate tax rates, U.S.-based companies operating internationally have kept their foreign earnings in subsidiaries overseas rather than bringing them back to the United States. They do this because U.S. marginal tax rates are, by some measures, the highest in the developed world. Some financial experts say ...

Citizens are departing high tax US states for low tax rates. These effects are particularly strong among bordering states. Each positive 1 percentage point tax burden differential between states decreases the ratio of income migration into the high tax state by 6.78 percent in a given year. This paper highlights the states ...

Property taxes since 2000 have risen twice as fast as consumer prices in Cook County, Illinois, with the steepest increases in suburban Chicago, according to a Heartland Institute analysis released this week. With 5.2 million residents, Cook County includes the City of Chicago and is the second-most populous county in the nation ...

Introduction The economic recession that began in 2007 exposed and aggravated a government fiscal crisis that had been brewing for many years at the national, state, and municipal levels of the U.S. Slow or negative economic growth, falling housing values, and rising government spending came together to make it impossible to ...

Hydraulic fracturing has enabled profitable extraction of oil and gas in diverse areas of the country. As a result, many states sitting atop the country’s shale formations are reconsidering the way they tax these resources, to fill budget holes. Many of these debates are occurring in states with unconventional deposits and where ...

As the debate on federal tax reform continues, the ACCF Center for Policy Research (CPR) presents this Special Report to further the debate and highlight the effect of increased federal tax rates on long-term individual capital gains tax rates when both the federal, state and, in some cases, local tax rates are combined. Long ...