Last month the Tax Foundation released the 2012 edition of their State Business Tax Climate Index, a measure of how business-friendly a state's tax system is. The overall index is comprised of 5 sub-indexes, measuring the "business-friendliness" of a state's corporate income, individual income, sales, property, and unemployment insurance taxes. This year, West Virginia ranked 23rd, with…
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Last week, I was asked to present before the Senate Economic Development Committee on our projected estimates regarding S.B. 182 - which creates the WV Future Fund proposed by Senate President Jeff Kessler. During the meeting, Mark Muchow, the Deputy Secretary of the WV Department of Revenue, also presented the committee with a history of…
Last night, in his State of the Union address, President Obama asked Congress to pass an extension of the payroll tax cut without delay. The original tax cut, which reduced the employee share of Social Security taxes, expired at the end of 2011 and was extended for two months. Along with the payroll tax cut, Congress…
We've brought up creating some sort of trust fund with the state's severance tax revenue time and time again, so it was good to read about state Republican legislators talking about a severance tax fund in the Gazette this morning. However, it was disappointing to see that their proposal was to use a severance tax fund to…
When we last talked about growing income inequality, the CBO had released a report showing that incomes for the richest households in the U.S. have been growing much faster than the incomes of the poor and middle class. Another study, this time from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), has confirmed that income inequality is on the…
While the state should be doing all that it can to stimulate economic growth and jobs, cutting business taxes is an inefficient, regressive and poor choice for creating broadly shared prosperity. As Sean has pointed out, there are much better ways to accomplish this goal. As AP points out today, the corporate net income tax…
Today, the Washington Post had an insightful op-ed highlighting the large and critical role federal spending played in the boom in shale gas drilling: Many often point to the shale gas revolution as evidence that the private sector, in response to market forces, is better than government bureaucrats at picking technological winners. It's a compelling story, one that…
Today's Daily Mail had an article about a proposed tax incentive designed to lure a potential "ethane cracker" to West Virginia. The proposal would reduced the assessment rate for property taxes from 60% to 5% for the cracker facility. This would dramatically lower the facility's property tax burden, to the tune of about $500 million over the next…
In his column this morning Phil Kabler briefly noted that the result of capping the state's contribution to retiree health insurance was "that the burden was shifted onto current and future retirees." This is something I wrote about last week, so it was nice to see this basic point acknowledged in print. Another point that has…