Over the last 20 years, West Virginia has made substantial progress in reducing the state income taxes paid by families living in poverty. In 1990, the state income tax threshold (the point at which residents begin to pay state income taxes) on families of four living at the federal poverty line was $8,000 compared to…
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Our friends at the CBPP have released a new report today debunking the "Texas economic miracle" of the Great Recession. The report lists several factors for why Texas has weathered the recession better than most states. Two of these factors, including a lack of a housing bubble and above average employment in natural resource extraction,…
Earlier this week, Ted blogged about coal prices, and suggested that coal prices are not strongly influenced by state policy, and instead are set regionally. This would mean that differences in state taxes on coal production do not play a large role in the price of coal. The below chart shows the average price of coal for West…
In the debate over the federal government's recent budget deficits, many are arguing that government spending over the last couple of years has been out of control. However, the numbers show that is just not true. This chart looks compares the average annual growth rate of government spending by decade since the 1950s. And as…
Robert Semple writes convincingly that gas prices are not set by Presidents, but are set in a global market, and that they are beyond the control of any one country. As Dean Baker pointed out last week, "Oil prices in the United States depend on the world market, not just supply and demand in the…
Today's news that Shell Oil Company has chosen a site in Pennsylvania as the location for their new cracker facility comes after months of competition between PA, WV, and OH over which state would land the cracker, with each state offering a variety of incentives. (A "cracker facility" converts ethane from natural gas liquids into more profitable chemicals…
Yesterday, our sister group in Kentucky - the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy - released a report advocating the creation of a coal severance tax trust fund. As readers know, this is something we've been pushing in West Virginia for over two years. So, it is great news to read that the idea is being…
Here's an article that appeared in the Gazette about the strain Medicaid is putting on the state's budget. Due to the loss of stimulus funds, the declining federal match rate (which is tied to rising income in the state), and rising health care costs, state officials are scrambling to find a way to keep Medicaid funded.…
In his Friday column, Paul Krugman points out that state expenditures for higher ed has fallen by 12 percent over the last five years after adjusting for inflation. Krugman highlights that one result of this disinvestment has been a 70 percent growth in inflation-adjusted tuition at public four-year colleges over the last decade. This got…
On the heels of their 2012 State Business Tax Climate Index is a new report from the Tax Foundation, called Location Matters: A Comparative Analysis of State Tax Costs on Business. What's the difference? While the State Business Tax Climate attempted to measure the "business friendliness" of each state's tax system, the Location Matters report attempts to measure…