Summary
Nine states cutting income taxes on January 1, 2025: Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, and West Virginia.
Most reductions occur in Republican-led states, with changes like flat tax rates in Iowa (3.8%) and Louisiana (3%).
Democrat-led New Mexico targets middle- and low-income taxpayers.
Proponents argue these cuts enhance economic competitiveness, while critics warn of potential public service impacts.
Several states plan further reductions in coming years.
I think most people have no understanding of taxes.
I remember a coworker some years ago fully believed we had a flat tax rate. That they just take 20% of your money. I had to explain progressive taxation to him.
We should be investing a lot more in public education.
We could lower taxes on the lower brackets, maybe, but we should be raising taxes that target the wealthy. Fix the “buy borrow die” strategy, too.
I had to explain how the progressive tax bracket works on a per-dollar-earned basis to my 65 year old mother last month. Turns out she had thought the different brackets were the amount paid in taxes on all of the income for the year based on year end totals, which is why she assumed the billionaires were getting hit with 37%+ tax and how it was unfair that poor people paid 10-20% and why she has been advocating and voting for a flat tax. She still isn’t changing her mind about anything but at least she now understands how each dollar is taxed I guess.
The lack of public education is what makes “opportunities” like a felon making it into the White House or any of the other batshit insane going-ons possible, and those that benefit would have it no other way.
Yes, we should. Sadly, in these Republican led states, the GOP has been gutting the education system since at least the Reagan era and they’ve been breathtakingly successful at it.
Unfortunately the wealthy already pay the lions share of taxes. What needs to happen is, we need less waste. So much spending is stolen by private companies via contracts that it’s a joke. We’re the wealthiest nation on the planet, yet we seem to always be broke.
Louisiana is raising sales taxes as a result, so this effectively is just more switching the tax burden to lower income people.
This is why I’m so surprised by the pro-right headline from CBS News.
These aren’t tax cuts that “give tax payers a break,” they occur in Republican states with regressive tax regimes that keep the poor people’s tax burden high through sales and other taxes and/or come with cuts in social services that those poorest people rely on.
Republicans as usual have reduced the quality of life of citizens with the simple and effective propaganda, “lower tax number good,” and the media are uncritically repeating it.
I’m not surprised in the least.
Most mainstream media has right-wing bias. They operate with the assumption that the right is operating in good faith and that the left is directly responsible for everything that happens on their watch.
The fact that the right still looks absolutely evil on the news is because the right is out there screaming about how evil they are.
Here in Arkansas, they’ve been shifting the tax burden from income to sales tax as well. And it’s also presented as tax cutting rather than taxing the working class more.
That’s just what the bootlickers want. They’re happy to pay more in taxes as long as it punishes “undesirables”
As a condition of receiving federal funds, states with budget deficits shouldn’t be allowed to cut income taxes; it’s essentially passing off those costs to taxpayers in other states.
