House GOP considers a short-term debt limit suspension. House Republicans are internally debating a measure to suspend the statutory debt limit until the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. The delay would not be tied to specific spending cuts but would give Republicans more time to negotiate over possible reductions. Some Republican lawmakers might be more willing to temporarily suspend the borrowing limit than raise it. Meanwhile Democrats are pushing GOP lawmakers to make their specific spending cuts public.
Expect JCT’s Blue Book by the end of June. The Joint Committee on Taxation expects to publish its explanations of tax provisions passed by the 117th Congress in several months. The Blue Book will cover major tax-related bills passed in 2021 and 2022, including the Inflation Reduction Act and American Rescue Plan, as well as any technical corrections to prior laws.
Twelve Pennsylvania school districts raised taxes without voter approval. The state’s auditor general accused the school districts of “strategically transferring and committing funds” in their budgets to raise taxes above the Pennsylvania limit without required voter approval. The districts raised property taxes 37 times over four years, increasing their General Fund accounts to $390 million. Auditor General Timothy DeFoor called their efforts “basically a ‘shell game.’”
What’s in store for state tax cuts in 2023? Thirty-five states and the District of Columbia cut taxes last year with varied designs and expected effects. To help state policymakers navigate economic and fiscal uncertainty, TPC’s Richard Auxier and David Weiner used TPC’s state income tax model to analyze three major types of individual income tax cuts enacted in Connecticut, Delaware, Mississippi, Utah and Vermont. Their work shows how the changes reduced state revenues and affected different types of households—key information for state budget officers in 2023.
What’s the cost of parking? Like other fines and fees, parking tickets may disproportionately burden people of color and those with low incomes. To find out what is happening, TPC’s Livia Mucciolo, Fay Walker, and Arvin Boddupalli conducted a preliminary analysis of parking ticket data in Austin, Minneapolis and Portland, Oregon. They reviewed tickets issued between 2018 and 2019 but concluded more data are needed to fully understand the implications.
Norway’s energy tax revenue soars. The nation expects to collect $89.5 billion in oil and gas tax revenue for 2022, three times what it collected in 2021. Soaring gas prices, which spiked after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February, drove the record tax revenue. Most goes into Norway’s $1.34 trillion Government Pension Fund Global oil fund, the biggest sovereign wealth fund in the world.
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