Federal Budget and Taxes

Our Upside-Down Tax System

Posted by Diana Polson on April 25, 2017 9:33 am
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The Pew Research Center released the findings from a recent survey (conducted April 5-11, 2017) that shows an increasing number of Americans find our current tax system unfair.

What do people believe is most unfair about our tax system? Nearly 2/3 (62%) of Americans are bothered “a lot” because some corporations do not pay their fair share in taxes; 60% are equally bothered because some wealthy people don’t pay their fair share.

A significantly less number of Americans are bothered by the amount they pay in taxes (only 27% are bothered “a lot” by this).

Repeal of the Affordable Care Act: A $31 billion tax cut for a handful of the wealthiest taxpayers

Posted by Mark Price on March 20, 2017 2:34 pm
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In Pennsylvania, the top 1% of families have captured just over half of all the growth in market incomes between 1979 and 2013 (Figure A above). As we have argued, this imbalance is largely the result of policy choices that have favored financial executives and CEOs over working families.

Trump Budget Slashes State and Local Grants at Tough Time for States

Posted by Shelley Aragoncillo on March 20, 2017 12:59 pm
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This post, written by Iris J. Lav, originally appeared on the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities blog on March 17, 2017. You can view the original post here.

How did the Pennsylvania Labor Market Perform in 2016

Last Friday, The Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry released preliminary estimates of December payrolls which show Pennsylvania created 32,000 jobs in the last 12 months. Payroll growth was especially weak in the 2nd half of 2016, which is likely one reason state revenue collections through December are $300 million below projections. Despite this weakness, payrolls still grew more in 2016 than they did in 2012 and 2013 when deep budget cuts weighed on job growth in Pennsylvania.

New Data, Good News: Health Insurance

Posted by Marc Stier on September 14, 2016 5:23 pm
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Most news is bad news. And political campaigns are more likely to flag what is wrong with our country than what is right with it. So, it’s not surprising that in the heat of a presidential election, we are more focused on what is wrong with our country than what is right with it.

But as the federal government updates its statistics on income, poverty and health care this week, we can take a moment to appreciate the good news—government at the federal and state level has been increasingly successful at encouraging broadly prosperity.

A funny thing happened to our data on the way to Philadelphia

If you have been following this gubernatorial election, or just watching television, you might have noticed that the Wolf campaign has been arguing that 27,000 jobs were lost in education in Pennsylvania.  That’s a figure my colleagues and I released in late August in our annual State of Working Pennsylvania.  To generate that number we used data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to calculate education employment in local governments in the 2010-11 school year, which ran from July 2010 to June 2011.

Internet access taxes – let state and local government decide

Posted by Jan Jarrett on July 14, 2014 9:01 am
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Since 1998 when it passed the Internet Tax Freedom Act (ITFA), Congress has banned state and local governments from enacting new taxes on internet access or including internet access in existing sales taxes. Now Congress is considering making the ban permanent. The House Judiciary Committee recently approved a bill that would do just that.

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