Alaska has the third best tax system for business in the nation for the second year in a row. |
Alaska, in many respects, is a cheaper tax place to do business and should be a very attractive place for companies to locate or expand in. |
Americans spent 6 billion hours last year complying with the tax code. |
Despite the tax cuts passed by the federal government, Americans will spend more on taxes than they spend on food, clothing, and housing combined. |
If local citizens want to pony up the money to right this wrong, they should put up the tax dollars. They should not come begging to Washington to do it. |
If you were to look at Alaska simply with its corporate tax code compared to the rest of the United States, it would rank very poorly because it's a very complicated corporate tax system, very high tax rates, but that is offset and balanced by the fact that Alaska does not have a personal income tax and does not have a sales tax. |
In fact, for Illinois to have equaled New Mexico's sweet deal -- $2 back for every $1 it paid in federal taxes -- Washington would have to funnel 20 percent of all federally appropriated dollars to Illinois, an impossible amount. The only hope for rapid improvement in Illinois' ratio would be a fundamental tax reform that flattened federal income tax rates. |
Instead, what we see is yet another blue-ribbon panel tinkering around the edges of a system that is absolutely broken. |
It is absolutely staggering the amount of money the oil companies already pay in taxes. Government has profited more from the oil industry than the oil industry has profited from consumers. |
It's bad for the federal government to rely on a shrinking group of American to pay all the bills and exclude millions of people from paying their fair share or some share. |
States do not enact tax changes in a vacuum. Every tax change will affect a state's competitive position relative to its neighbors, as well as globally. |
Taxes matter to businesses. How a state taxes business is just as important as how much a state taxes businesses. |
The problem isn't the number of dollars Illinois gets back from Washington. It's the number of dollars Illinois sends Washington in the first place. |
These findings raise serious questions about the future of the U.S. income tax system. The majority of the federal tax burden is being borne by a shrinking pool of taxpayers. As Congress considers tax reform proposals during the coming year, this is an issue lawmakers should begin to debate. |
What we need is a windfall profits tax on government. Government makes far more money per gallon than the oil companies do. |