With tax reform on the West Virginia Legislature’s agenda, attention has once again turned to West Virginia’s business personal property tax. In October, the conservative anti-tax group The Tax Foundation testified to the Select Joint Committee on Tax Reform that moving away from the business personal property tax would help attract businesses and grow the…
Tax and Budget
Overhauling West Virginia’s tax system is on the agenda of the leadership of the West Virginia legislature. As citizens and stakeholders of West Virginia, we appreciate this effort and the thoroughness with which the Joint Select Committee on Tax Reform has investigated the many issues involved. Read PDF. A diverse coalition of organizations that cares…
Several years ago, West Virginia enacted a series of large business tax cuts with the belief that they would help grow the state’s economy. Today policymakers are promoting that same theory, even though the previous tax cuts have largely failed to put West Virginia on a path to prosperity, with the state losing thousands of…
On Monday, the Joint Select Committee on Taxation met again to discuss revising our state's tax system. The focus of this meeting was on local property taxation, especially as it impacts the coal and natural gas industries. During the meeting, John Mairs, a lawyer for the coal industry, stated that he "would love to have…
While the last post found that state income taxes have little or no impact on interstate migration, there is also little evidence that slashing or eliminating the personal income tax is a surefire way to boost economic growth in the Mountain State. Most of the states that have followed this path recently have not experienced…
In the last post, I gave an overview of West Virginia's personal income tax and how it is an important and progressive way to fund state investments in K-12 education, higher education, and other important public structures. In this post, I want to tackle misleading information surrounding the argument to cut or abolish state personal…
Monday, the Joint Select Committee on Tax Reform met again to continue the discussion of the proposed overhaul of West Virginia's tax system. The committee heard from economists from WVU and Marshall University, as well as representatives from the conservative Tax Foundation, the Council on State Taxation, and the National Conference of State Legislatures. The…
Last week, the newly created Joint Select Committee on Tax Reform held its second meeting to discuss overhauling the state's tax system. While the meeting included an overview of the state's current tax system and historical tax reform efforts of the past (e.g. Cecil Underwood's Commission on Fair Taxation), committee members made it quite clear in April…
With tax reform looming on the state's public policy agenda, now would be a opportune time to revisit the state's Excess Acreage Tax. Since 1905, a corporation purchasing 10,000 acres or more of property in the state is subject to a one-time five cents per acre tax on owning the property. In 1999, Governor Underwood's…
Yesterday Governor Tomblin announced his vetoes to the FY 2016 budget, which the legislature completed last week. As we went over here, the legislature increased the amount borrowed from the Rainy Day Fund to $22.9 million, in turn increasing appropriations above the governor's recommendations in some areas, including higher education. With his veto, the governor…