A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems in All Fifty States (the fifth edition of the report), assesses the fairness of state and local tax systems by measuring the state and local taxes that will be paid in 2015 by different income groups as a share of their incomes. The report examines every state and the District of Columbia. It discusses important features of each state’s tax system and includes detailed state-by-state profiles that provide essential baseline data to help lawmakers understand the effect tax reform proposals will have on constituents at all income levels.
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New In 2017: Fairness Matters: A Chart Book
INTRODUCTIONIn fact, recent years have brought tax proposals and changes in multiple states that would overwhelmingly benefit the highest income households under the guise of stimulating economic growth.
Please Note: This report doesn’t seek to rebut ideological claims; rather it is an in-depth analysis of all taxes that all people pay at the state and local level.
The bottom line is that every state fails the basic test of tax fairness. The District of Columbia is the only tax system that requires its best-off citizens to pay as much of their incomes in state and local taxes as the very poorest taxpayers, but middle-income taxpayers in DC pay far more than the top one percent. In other words, every single state and local tax system is regressive and even the states that do better than others have much room for improvement.
Unfair tax systems not only exacerbate widening income inequality in the short term, but they also will leave states struggling to raise enough revenue to meet their basic needs in the long term.
In fact, a September 2014 Standard and Poor’s (S&P) study concludes that rising income inequality can make it more difficult for state tax systems to pay for needed services over time. The more income that goes to the wealthy, the slower a state’s revenue grows. Digging deeper, S&P also found that not all states have been affected in the same way by rising inequality.
States that rely heavily on sales taxes tend to be hardest hit by growing income inequality, while states that rely heavily on personal income taxes don’t experience the same negative effect.
THE 10 MOST REGRESSIVE STATE AND LOCAL TAX SYSTEMS
Ten states — Washington, Florida, Texas, South Dakota, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Arizona, Kansas, and Indiana — are particularly regressive. These “Terrible Ten” states tax their poorest residents — those in the bottom 20 percent of the income scale — at rates up to seven times higher than the wealthy. Middle-income families in these states pay a rate up to three times higher as a share of their income as the wealthiest families.
What characteristics do states with particularly regressive tax systems have in common? Looking at the ten most regressive tax states, several important factors stand out:
• Four of the ten states do not levy a personal income tax — Florida, South Dakota, Texas, and Washington. An additional state, Tennessee, only applies its personal income tax to interest and dividend income.
• Five states do levy personal income taxes, but have structured them in a way that makes them much less progressive than in other states. Pennsylvania , Illinois and Indiana use a flat rate which taxes the income of the wealthiest family at the same marginal rate as the poorest wage earner. Arizona has a graduated rate structure, however there is little difference between the bottom marginal rate and top marginal rate. Kansas’ graduated rate structure only has two brackets, applying the top rate starting at $30,000 for married couples.
• Six of the ten most regressive tax systems — those of Washington, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Arizona and Florida — rely very heavily on regressive sales and excise taxes. These states derive roughly half to two-thirds of their tax revenue from these taxes, compared to the national average of 34 percent in fiscal year 2011-20.
State page for Arizona Go Here >> http://www.itep.org/whopays/states/arizona.php
THE KIND OF TAX MATTERS
State and local governments seeking to fund public services have historically relied on three broad types of taxes — personal income, property, and consumption (sales and excise) taxes.
Sales and excise taxes are very regressive. Poor families pay almost eight times more of their incomes in these taxes than the best-off families, and middle-income families pay more than five times the rate of the wealthy.
Sales and excise taxes are the most regressive element in most state and local tax systems. Sales taxes inevitably take a larger share of income from low- and middle-income families than from rich families because sales taxes are levied at a flat rate and spending as a share of income falls as income rises. Thus, while a flat-rate general sales tax may appear on its face to be neither progressive nor regressive, that is not its practical impact. Unlike an income tax, which generally applies to most income, the sales tax applies only to spent income and exempts saved income. Since high earners are able to save a much larger share of their incomes than middle-income families — and since the poor can rarely save at all — the tax is inherently regressive.The average state’s consumption tax structure is equivalent to an income tax with a 7 percent rate for the poor, a 4.7 percent rate for the middle class, and a 0.8 percent rate for the wealthiest taxpayers. Few policymakers would intentionally design an income tax that looks like this, but many have done so by relying heavily on consumption taxes as a revenue source.
The treatment of groceries is the most important factor affecting sales tax fairness. Taxing food is a particularly regressive policy because poor families spend most of their income on groceries and other necessities. Of the 10 most regressive sales taxes in the country, five apply the tax to groceries in some form. A few states have enacted preferential tax rates for taxpayers perceived to have less ability to pay — for example, South Carolina’s sales tax rate is lower for taxpayers over 85 — but these special rates usually apply to taxpayers regardless of income level. Arkansas exempts some utilities for low-income taxpayers.
Sales taxes are usually calculated as a percentage of the price of a fairly broad base of taxable items. Excise taxes, by contrast, are imposed on a small number of goods, typically ones for which demand has a practical per-person maximum (for example, one can only use so much gasoline). Thus, wealthy people don’t keep buying more of these goods as their income increases. Moreover, excise taxes are typically based on volume rather than price — per gallon, per pack and so forth. Thus better-off people pay the same absolute tax on an expensive premium beer as low-income families pay on a run-of-the-mill variety. As a result, excise taxes are usually the most regressive kind of tax.
In addition to being the most regressive tax, excise taxes are relatively poor revenue-raising tools because they decline in real value over time. Since excise taxes are levied on a per-unit basis rather than ad valorem (percentage of value), the revenue generated is eroded by inflation. That means excise tax rates must continually be increased merely to keep pace with inflation, not to mention real economic growth. Policy makers using excise tax hikes to close fiscal gaps should recognize that relying on excise tax revenues means balancing state budgets on the back of the very poorest taxpayers — and that these revenues represent a short-term fix rather than a long-term solution.
LOW TAXES OR JUST REGRESSIVE TAXES?
This report focuses on the most regressive state and local tax systems and the factors that make them so. Many of the most regressive states have another trait in common: they are frequently hailed as “low-tax” states, often with an emphasis on their lack of an income tax. But this raises the question: “low tax” for whom?
No income-tax states like Washington, Texas and Florida do, in fact, have average to low taxes overall. However, they are far from “low-tax” for poor families. In fact, these states’ disproportionate reliance on sales and excise taxes make their taxes among the highest in the entire nation on low-income families.
Hawaii, which relies heavily on consumption taxes, ranks second in its taxes on the poor, at 13.4 percent. Illinois taxes its poor families at a rate of 13.2 percent, ranking third in this dubious category.
The bottom line is that many so-called “low-tax” states are high-tax states for the poor, and most do not offer a good deal to middle-income families either. Only the wealthy in such states pay relatively little. Putting basic moral concerns aside, creating more fair state tax systems is an economic imperative. Over the last four decades the share of income and wealth accruing to those at the top of the income scale has skyrocketed, while wages and income for working and middle-class families have stagnated; today, the top 20 percent of Americans as a group earn more income than the bottom 80 percent combined. As a result, states that rely on regressive sales, excise and property taxes rather than income taxes have experienced faster revenue decline than states with more progressive tax structures.
The vast majority of states allow their very best-off residents to pay much lower effective tax rates than their middle- and low-income families must pay — so when the richest taxpayers grow even richer, these exploding incomes hardly make a ripple in state tax collections. And when the same states see incomes stagnate or even decline at the bottom of the income distribution it has a palpable, devastating effect on state revenue. A recent Standard & Poor’s report found that the more income growth goes to the wealthy and incomes stagnate or decline at the bottom, the slower a state’s revenue grows, especially if the state relies more heavily on taxes that disproportionately fall on low- and middle-income households. Hitching your state’s funding of investments to those with a shrinking share income is not a path to a sustainable, growing revenue stream.
Moreover, shrinking revenues and overreliance on regressive taxes prevent states from investing in the priorities that will bolster the prospects of low- and middle-income residents: education, workforce development, infrastructure improvements, and adequate healthcare. State tax structures that rely on trickle-down theories of economic growth, balance budgets on the backs of working families rather than asking the wealthy to do more, and fail to improve the wellbeing of the majority of that state’s residents will fail to be competitive in the long run. Shortsighted tax cuts can be a long-term drag on development. The main finding of this report is that virtually every state’s tax system is fundamentally unfair. The overreliance on consumption taxes and the absence of a progressive personal income tax in many states neutralize whatever benefits the working poor receive from low-income tax credits. The bleak reality is that even among the 25 states and the District of Columbia that have taken steps to reduce the working poor’s tax share by enacting state EITCs, most still require their poorest taxpayers to pay a higher effective tax rate than any other income group.
The results of this study are an important reference for lawmakers seeking to understand the inequitable tax structures enacted by their predecessors. States may ignore these lessons and continue to demand that their poorest citizens pay the highest effective tax rates. Or, they may decide instead to ask wealthier families to pay tax rates more commensurate with their incomes. In either case, the path that states choose in the near future will have a major impact on the well-being of their citizens — and on the fairness of state and local taxes.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The 2015 Who Pays: A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems in All Fifty States (the fifth edition of the report) assesses the fairness of state and local tax systems by measuring the state and local taxes that will be paid in 2015 by different income groups as a share of their incomes.1 The report examines every state and the District of Columbia. It discusses important features of each state’s tax system and includes detailed state-by-state profiles that provide essential baseline data to help lawmakers understand the effect tax reform proposals will have on constituents at all income levels.The report includes these main findings:
• Virtually every state tax system is fundamentally unfair, taking a much greater share of income from low- and middle-income families than from wealthy families. The absence of a graduated personal income tax and overreliance on consumption taxes exacerbate this problem.
• The lower one’s income, the higher one’s overall effective state and local tax rate. Combining all state and local income, property, sales and excise taxes that Americans pay, the nationwide average effective state and local tax rates by income group are 10.9 percent for the poorest 20 percent of individuals and families, 9.4 percent for the middle 20 percent and 5.4 percent for the top 1 percent.
• In the 10 states with the most regressive tax structures (the Terrible 10) the bottom 20 percent pay up to seven times as much of their income in taxes as their wealthy counterparts. Washington State is the most regressive, followed by Florida, Texas, South Dakota, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Arizona, Kansas, and Indiana.
• Heavy reliance on sales and excise taxes are characteristics of the most regressive state tax systems. Six of the 10 most regressive states derive roughly half to two-thirds of their tax revenue from sales and excise taxes, compared to a national average of roughly one-third . Five of these states do not levy a broad-based personal income tax (four do not have any taxes on personal income and one state only applies its personal income tax to interest and dividends) while four have a personal income tax rate structure that is flat or virtually flat.
• State personal income taxes are typically more progressive than the other taxes that states levy (e.g property, consumption). Sales and excise taxes are the most regressive, with poor families paying almost eight times more of their income in these taxes than wealthy families, and middle income families paying five times more. Property taxes are typically regressive as well, but less so than sales and excise taxes.
• Personal income taxes vary in fairness due to differences in rates, deductions, and exemptions across states. For example, the Earned Income Tax Credit improves progressivity in 25 states and the District of Columbia, while nine states undermine progressivity by allowing taxpayers to pay a reduced rate on capital gains income, which primarily benefits higher-income households.
• State consumption tax structures are highly regressive with an average 7 percent rate on sales and excise taxes for the poor, a 4.7 percent rate for middle-income people, and a 0.8 percent rate for the wealthiest taxpayers. Because food is one of the largest expenses for low-income families, taxing food is particularly regressive; five of the ten most regressive states tax food at the state or local level.
• Taxes on personal and business property are a significant revenue source for both states and localities and are generally regressive in their overall effect, particularly for middle-income households. A homestead exemption (exempting a flat dollar or percentage amount of property value from a property tax) lessens regressivity. A property tax circuit breaker that caps the amount a property owner pays in property taxes based on their personal income can also reduce regressivity; none of the 10 most regressive states offer this tax break to low-income families of all ages.
• States commended as “low tax” are often high tax states for low- and middle-income families. The 10 states with the highest taxes on the poor are Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, and Washington. Seven of these are also among the “terrible ten” because they are not only high tax for the poorest, but low tax for the wealthiest.
Source: http://www.whopays.org/
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