New Mexico’s unique cultural diversity, great natural beauty, and strong sense of community make it a resilient state, but there’s much more work to be done to achieve our full potential. Tax cuts for the wealthy and well-connected have bled New Mexico of the funding we need for critical investments in education, health care, and other services that help children succeed. After years of these race-to-the-bottom economic strategies, we’ve hit rock-bottom — we’re last in the nation for child well-being.
In our Roadmap to a Stronger New Mexico, we encourage elected officials to prioritize children in policymaking and budget decisions. We ask them to make the sometimes-tough decisions to put children and families first – because that’s the best way to strengthen New Mexico.
To move forward, we must:
• Invest in working families.
• Grow good jobs by investing in education.
• Invest in health.
• Promote equity and ensure that our communities have the tools they need to prosper.
• Restore an effective and efficient government that works for everyone.
Hawai‘i has a new resource to help make better budget and tax policy decisions, coming online at a critical time in light of recent and upcoming events in Washington.
The Hawai‘i Budget Primer serves as a starting point for a new effort to pull together data and information relating to the budget so policy makers, community leaders, and interested citizens can make better informed budget and policy decisions.
Takeaways from the Budget Primer include the following:
- Hawai‘i is last in the nation in terms of percentage of our state budget that comes from federal sources, suggesting that Hawai‘i may have an opportunity to attract more federal dollars to support state programs.
- State government spending accounts for 20 percent of the gross state product (GSP). In combination with county budgets, 26 percent of the GSP comes from Hawai‘i-based government.
- Hawai‘i residents with the lowest incomes pay almost twice as much of their earnings to state taxes than people with the highest incomes.
- The state’s biggest source of tax revenue is the general excise tax. The GET appears to be deceptively modest (4 to 4.5 percent) if seen as a sales tax but, because it’s an excise tax applied to virtually every transaction, the multiplied effect would equal a sales tax of 10 to 11 percent.
- Hawai‘i’s property taxes, which are collected at the county level only, are at the lowest rates in the country.
Publication
Policy Matters Ohio outlines here a set of changes to the state income tax—the only major tax based on the ability to pay—that will bolster our ability to make key investments in education, human services and local governments. It will begin to reverse the slant of our tax system against low- and middle-income Ohioans—yet because state and the recent federal tax cuts have been so enormous, few of even the richest residents will be paying more overall when our proposed increases are added to recent cuts.
A new analysis of the tax law Congress passed last December shows that it will shower benefits on the most affluent Ohioans – and that making its temporary provisions permanent will add to their gains, while providing much more modest savings for most residents.