As the Trump megabill blows holes in state budgets, Colorado is leading with reforms to curb offshore tax avoidance and roll back wasteful corporate subsidies.| ITEP
As federal data systems erode, the U.S. risks losing the impartial information needed for sound policymaking and public trust.| ITEP
Trump's megabill directs most benefits to the wealthy, while leaving younger generations with higher taxes, more debt, and fewer opportunities. For Millennials and Gen Z, it means reduced public investment and an economy less likely to work in their favor.| ITEP
Angie Sumo is a Summer 2025 Intern supporting the Communications team. She is an undergraduate student at Duke University, majoring in Global Health and Public Policy. Prior to ITEP, Angie developed a diverse set of skills through internships in government affairs, legal research, education policy, and private sector strategy, blending analytical rigor with practical experience […]| ITEP
The new tax law enacted last month found a temporary compromise on the level of the cap, boosting it to $40,000 through 2029, but failed to fix a loophole that allows some rich taxpayers with good accountants to completely avoid the cap| ITEP
SALT cap or no SALT cap, the mega bill overall is a bonanza for the rich in every state.| ITEP
Tax policies just really don’t drive relocation decisions, they’ve been claiming this for a long time, and there’s just very scant evidence to support it.| ITEP
A two- to three-day sales-tax-free shopping spree for selected items does nothing to reduce taxes for low- and moderate-income taxpayers during the other 362 days of the year.| ITEP
While tax news has slowed as summer comes to an end, there are rumblings beneath the surface that could be an inauspicious sign of the times ahead for states and state budgets.| ITEP
Rebuilding worker power by strengthening unions is not just good policy—it is a democratic imperative in the face of authoritarian backsliding.| ITEP
Many states with corporate income taxes include some amount of federally defined Global Intangible Low-Taxed Income (GILTI) in their tax bases. Twenty-one states plus D.C. include some amount of GILTI in their tax calculations in 2025.| ITEP
Key Findings To avoid taxation, American corporations use accounting gimmicks that make profits appear to be earned in foreign jurisdictions…| ITEP
The deduction for Foreign-Derived Intangible Income (FDII), one of the tax cuts included in former President Trump’s signature 2017 tax law, provides a lower effective tax rate on income earned from intangible assets, such as patents, trademarks, and other forms of intellectual property. Since the law went into effect in 2018, 15 corporations have separately reported more than $1 billion in tax benefits. Alphabet (the parent company of Google) reported the most, at more than $11 billion in ...| ITEP
The Educational Choice for Children Act of 2025 would ostensibly provide a tax break on charitable donations to organizations that give out private K-12 school vouchers. Most of the so-called “contributions,” however, would be made by wealthy people solely for the tax savings, as those savings would typically be larger than their contributions.| ITEP
The U.S. House Ways & Means Committee has advanced a new school voucher bill. H.R. 9462—the Educational Choice for Children Act of 2024—would create an unprecedented tax incentive designed to fund private, mostly religious, K-12 schools.| ITEP
Today the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) released its final regulations cracking down on a tax shelter long favored by private…| ITEP
Read as PDF Re: Recommendation for Inclusion of Section 1001 Regulation in 2023-2024 Priority Guidance Plan To Whom It May…| ITEP
The IRS recently proposed a commonsense improvement to the federal charitable deduction. If finalized, the regulation would prevent not just the newest workarounds to the $10,000 deduction for state and local taxes (SALT), but also a longer-running tax shelter abused by wealthy donors to private K-12 school voucher programs. ITEP has submitted official comments outlining four key recommendations related to the proposed regulation.| ITEP
Netflix's 2021 financial report shows it doubled its profits to $5.3 billion from the previous year and reported an effective federal corporate income tax rate of 1.1 percent.| ITEP
Nearly two dozen of America’s largest corporations together received roughly $50 billion in tax breaks from 2018 through 2021 under a Trump tax law provision that many lawmakers now want to extend. Corporate lobbyists are even asking Congress to extend this “accelerated depreciation” tax break as part of a possible year-end tax bill.| ITEP
If lawmakers believe it’s worthwhile to extend corporate tax breaks, then it would be entirely unreasonable for them to not conclude the same about tax provisions that help low-income children.| ITEP
Amazon avoided about $5.2 billion of federal income tax on its record $36 billion in U.S. pretax income for fiscal year 2021.| ITEP
The push by Congressional Republicans to make the provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent would cost nearly $300 billion in the first year and deliver the bulk of the tax benefits to the wealthiest Americans.| ITEP
The trio of tax bills that cleared the House Ways and Means Committee in June include tax cuts that would mostly benefit the richest one percent of Americans and foreign investors.| ITEP
The Trump Administration’s plan to turn IRS agents into deportation agents will result in lower tax collections in addition to the harm done to the families and communities directly affected by deportations.| ITEP
From 2021-2023, child poverty has more than doubled from 5.2 to 13.7 percent. The latest Census data make clear that lawmakers have the tools to help millions of children and their families – and it’s beyond time they take action.| ITEP
The Trump megabill hands the richest 1% a trillion-dollar windfall while gutting funding for health care, education, and disaster relief — leaving communities to pick up the pieces. State and local leaders must step up, tax the wealthiest fairly, and safeguard the essentials that keep America healthy, educated, and safe.| ITEP
Last week, President Trump fired the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in apparent retaliation for weak jobs numbers. The move drew sharp criticism for spooking investors and weakening trust in official data. But it also reflects a deeper problem: the ongoing erosion of the federal data infrastructure.| ITEP
This is a recklessly expensive bill that will expand economic inequality in America by making the tax code more tilted to the top, and pay for it in part by stripping health care from millions of Americans and rolling back critical climate investments.| ITEP
President Donald Trump’s mega tax-and-spending cuts bill, signed into law last week, contains plenty of new tax provisions, the contours of which Americans are still digesting.| ITEP
Exempting overtime pay from income tax has become a hot topic at both the state and federal levels. Alabama became…| ITEP
Zoom Video Communications, the company providing a platform used by remote workers and school children across the country during the pandemic, saw its profits increase by more than 4,000 percent last year but paid no federal corporate income tax on those profits.| ITEP
Congress permitted full expensing only for five years, which will encourage businesses to speed up investments they would have made later. Republicans in Congress have discussed making the expensing provision permanent. This report argues that Congress should move in the other direction and repeal not just the full expensing provision but even some of the permanent accelerated depreciation breaks in the tax code, for several reasons.| ITEP
Profitable corporations are subject to a 35 percent federal income tax rate on their U.S. profits. But many corporations pay far less, or nothing at all, because of the many tax loopholes and special breaks they enjoy. This report documents just how successful many Fortune 500 corporations have been at using loopholes and special breaks over the past eight years. As lawmakers look to reform the corporate tax code, this report shows that the focus of any overhaul should be on closing loopholes...| ITEP
The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act provides some needed relief for individuals and families, but two arcane tax provisions related to business losses will further enrich the wealthy and fail to boost our economy more broadly.| ITEP
The stock option rules in effect today create a problem because they allow corporations to report a much larger expense for this compensation to the IRS than they report to investors. The result is that corporations can report larger profits to investors but smaller profits to the IRS, undermining the fundamental fairness of the tax system.| ITEP
Thirty-nine profitable corporations in the S&P 500 or Fortune 500 paid no federal income tax from 2018 through 2020, the first three years that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) was in effect. Besides the 39 companies that paid nothing over three years, an additional 73 profitable corporations paid less than half the statutory corporate income tax rate of 21 percent established under TCJA. As a group, these 73 corporations paid an effective federal income tax rate of just 5.3 percent during th...| ITEP
The House of Representatives’ recently passed tax bill changes course on taxing multinational corporations engaged in shifting U.S. profits overseas, offering massive tax giveaways that weaken American revenues and risk sending more American corporate investment offshore.| ITEP
Former President Donald Trump has proposed a wide variety of tax policy changes. Taken together, these proposals would, on average, lead to a tax cut for the richest 5 percent of Americans and a tax increase for all other income groups.| ITEP
The House tax plan cuts charitable giving tax incentives for donors to most nonprofit groups while roughly tripling the incentive available to donors to groups that fund private K-12 school vouchers. The bill would also allow private school voucher donors to avoid capital gains tax on their gifts of corporate stock, creating a profitable tax shelter for wealthy people who agree to help funnel public funds into private schools. The bill would reduce federal tax revenue by $23.2 billion over th...| ITEP
Two parts of Trump’s 2017 tax law that are particularly expensive and beneficial to the richest individuals are the changes in income tax rates and brackets and the special deduction for “pass-through” business owners. Lawmakers should not extend these provisions for high-income households past the end of this year, when they are scheduled to expire.| ITEP
Private equity is doing fine on its own and does not need another tax break. Congress should keep the stricter limit on deductions for interest payments —one of the few provisions in the 2017 tax law that asked large businesses to pay a little bit more.| ITEP
The Educational Choice for Children Act of 2025 would provide donors to nonprofit groups that distribute private K-12 school vouchers with a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit in exchange for their contributions. In total, the ECCA would reduce federal and state tax revenues by $10.6 billion in 2026 and by $136.3 billion over the next 10 years. Federal tax revenues would decline by $134 billion over 10 years while state revenues would decline by $2.3 billion.| ITEP
If Congress creates a tax break to encourage businesses to conduct research that benefits society, should Netflix be eligible for…| ITEP
The federal estate tax has reached historic lows. In 2019, only 8 of every 10,000 people who died left an estate large enough to trigger the tax. Legislative changes under presidents of both parties have increased the basic exemption from the estate tax over the past 20 years. This has cut the share of adults leaving behind taxable estates down from more than 2 percent to well under 1 percent.| ITEP
Since TCJA expanded tax breaks for “accelerated depreciation” starting in 2018, it has reduced taxes by nearly $67 billion for the 25 profitable corporations that benefited the most. Congress is now looking at extending this policy.| ITEP
Congressional Republicans have floated a proposal to strip the Child Tax Credit from millions of children who are U.S. citizens and legal residents in situations where their parents do not have Social Security numbers. Approximately 4.5 million citizen children with Social Security numbers would lose access to the credit under this proposal.| ITEP
Undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022. Providing access to work authorization for undocumented immigrants would increase their tax contributions both because their wages would rise and because their rates of tax compliance would increase.| ITEP
Regardless of future Child Tax Credit developments at the federal level, state policies can supplement the federal credit to deliver additional benefits to children and families. State credits can be specifically tailored to meet the needs of local populations while also producing long-term benefits for society as a whole| ITEP
Expanding the federal Child Tax Credit to 2021 levels would help nearly 60 million children next year. It would help the lowest-income children the most and would particularly help children and families of color.| ITEP
In his latest budget proposal, President Biden proposes enhancing the Child Tax Credit (CTC) based on the temporary credit that was in effect for 2021 as part of the American Rescue Plan Act. In this report we analyze how that proposal would help children and families.| ITEP
The Child Tax Credit expansion led to a 46 percent decline in childhood poverty. That it could be accomplished during the largest economic disruption in most of our lifetimes underscores a basic fact: thoughtful, decisive government action to combat poverty works.| ITEP
Contact: Jon Whiten (jon@itep.org) Immigration policies have taken center stage in public debates this year, but much of the conversation…| ITEP
Keeping the Kentucky income tax on a march to zero would mean tax hikes for working families or widespread cuts to education, health care, and other public services. Reversing course is certainly the wiser course of action.| ITEP
The new Census data should provide both concern and optimism for lawmakers. The steep rise in child poverty is an inexcusable tragedy. But it shows that child poverty is avoidable when Congress makes the decision to make tax policy for those who need the hand up rather than for the rich and powerful.| ITEP
More than one in four dollars of wealth in the U.S. is held by a tiny fraction of households with net worth over $30 million. Nationally, we estimate that wealth over $30 million per household will reach $26 trillion in 2022 with roughly one-fifth of that amount ($4.5 trillion) held by billionaires.| ITEP
Wealthy families are overwhelmingly the ones using school voucher tax credits to opt out of paying for public education and other public services and to redirect their tax dollars to private and religious institutions instead. Most of these credits are being claimed by families with incomes over $200,000.| ITEP
At least 55 of the largest corporations in America paid no federal corporate income taxes in their most recent fiscal year despite enjoying substantial pretax profits in the United States. This continues a decades-long trend of corporate tax avoidance by the biggest U.S. corporations, and it appears to be the product of long-standing tax breaks preserved or expanded by the 2017 tax law as well as the CARES Act tax breaks enacted in the spring of 2020.| ITEP
Who Pays? is the only distributional analysis of tax systems in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. This comprehensive 7th edition of the report assesses the progressivity and regressivity of state tax systems by measuring effective state and local tax rates paid by all income groups.| ITEP
