President Trump expands tariffs on derivative steel and aluminum products from some countries. He signed a proclamation on Friday that raises tariffs by an additional 25 percent on imported derivative steel products and by 10 percent on imported derivative aluminum products such as nails, staples, and electrical wires. Current tariffs are 25 percent on raw steel and 10 percent on raw aluminum. Trump exempted Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico and South Korea from the new steel tariffs and Argentina, Australia, Canada, and Mexico from the additional aluminum tariffs.
Post-Brexit, will Prime Minister Boris Johnson use tariffs to pressure other countries to make trade deals with United Kingdom? The British leader and his cabinet ministers say they may use them as “leverage” to speed up trade talks with the European Union, United States, and other countries. High tariffs could reach 30 percent on some French cheese and 10 percent on German cars. Sound familiar?
Wisconsin’s tax collections are up. The state’s nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau updated its projections for the biennium, finding that the state’s general fund will grow by $452 million more than previously projected. The bureau now expects an increase of $818 million in taxes through the middle of 2021 due in part to stronger corporate tax collections. Predictably, Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on what to do with the extra money. Democrats want to spend it on public programs, Republicans prefer tax cuts.
An Idaho lawmaker thinks the property tax is evil, but apparently the sales tax is not. The assistant majority leader of the Idaho House, Republican Jason Monks, wants to eliminate property taxes and raise the state sales tax from 6 percent to 11 percent. Monks says the property tax is “kind of an evil tax” that “dates back to the dark ages or the middle ages when the lords of the manor had to pay taxes to the Kings and the Queens otherwise they didn't get to keep their land and frankly... we still have that system today.” He characterizes his call for a constitutional amendment to prohibit property taxation without a statewide vote as a “thought grenade.”
States have tax expenditures too. A new TPC brief by Aravind Boddupalli, Frank Sammartino, and Eric Toder uses California, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and the District of Columbia to illustrate how these preferences are ingrained in state tax policy. The authors show that individual and business tax expenditures range from 51 percent of total income tax revenues in California to 61 percent in Minnesota in fiscal year 2020. Roughly three-quarters of the lost revenue comes from federal income tax provisions that states retain when they conform their tax codes to the federal law. States also subsidize activities through their own tax expenditure provisions.
Call for papers for the Taxation and Gender Equality Conference, September 14-15, 2020. The Tax Policy Center, the American Tax Policy Institute, the American Bar Foundation, and other groups will cosponsor a conference aimed at shining a spotlight on gender issues in taxation. The conference will focus on both the US and other countries and will address the relationships of all taxes to gender. Learn more about the research, round table, and policy program, and how to contribute to it, here. Expressions of interest are due March 15.
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