Job growth has been running 80% stronger in low-tax states than in high-tax states since the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 in December 2017. Understanding why holds important lessons for policy, economics, and politics. The new tax law scaled back the federal subsidy for high state and local taxes. Prior...
One in every five Americans calls California or Texas home. Comparisons between the two most-populous states are useful because both states have diverse populations and economies, but vastly different politics. That, in turn, leads to divergent public policies in taxation and regulation—with very different outcomes. Demographically, California and Texas both feature minority-majority populations, with the...
Trying to stand out in a crowded field, Democratic candidates for president have so far proposed nine separate tax increase ideas totaling more than $10 trillion. We can break them down into three basic groups. First are tax hikes that hit banks or Wall Street—two interests without a lot of friends. The problem with these is...
TPPF’s Chuck DeVore addressed the Independent Power Producers of New York and spoke about the difference between logic and virtue-signaling. Logic, he said, is about the facts. Virtue-signaling isn’t. Take Georgetown, Texas—the Austin suburb that has pledged to use 100 percent renewable electricity. Its promise achieves all the right political goals, but when the facts...
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Green New Deal — an update to the “Sustainable City Plan” released in April — sets out three broad goal categories: increase the quality of life; reduce pollution that harms people; and reduce carbon dioxide emissions. L.A.’s quality of life challenges are nothing new to any person familiar with the...
When the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention convened in Philadelphia in 1787, foremost among their concerns was addressing the growing tendency among states to tax or inhibit their neighbors’ commercial trade. New York was an especially nettlesome practitioner of economic warfare on adjacent states, placing import duties on New Jersey cabbage and Connecticut firewood...
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released its April employment report this morning, showing continued robust growth in the job market with 263,000 jobs added in April. The official unemployment rate is now 3.6%, the lowest it has been since 1969. Notably, wages were up 3.2% from a year ago. With inflation remaining tame, real buying power...
The U.S. economy grew at a 3.2% annual rate in the first quarter, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Analysts expected a far slower growth rate of 2.3%. President Trump has consistently said that his pro-growth policies—tax cuts and regulatory reform—would shift the economy into higher growth than was experienced under his predecessor, President Obama. The economy...
Last week, Steve Adler, the mayor of Austin, Texas, announced that city taxpayers would be paying $460 million for a biomass power plant they’d previously paid $128 million to help build on top of a yearly payment of $54 million for six years—that generated electricity for all of two months. The Nacogdoches Generating Facility in East Texas...
Polls show that the majority of Americans don’t think their taxes were cut with the landmark tax cut and reform bill signed into law by President Donald Trump in December 2017. But just in time for tax day, the New York Times published a well-written and counter-intuitive analysis by two of their economics reporters, Ben Casselman and Jim Tankersley....
The 2018 mid-term elections delivered California Democrats a firm supermajority in both legislative houses after years of steady, incremental gains. Now, as the 2019 legislative session begins there in earnest, it’s clear that the ascendant progressives who control both chambers are intent on increasing taxes. There’s a Democratic drive to hike taxes of every imaginable type – attorneys, car...
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released its March employment report this morning, estimating that employers added 196,000 nonfarm jobs. The official unemployment rate remained unchanged at 3.8%. The federal bureau revised its January jobs estimate up by 1,000 to 312,000 jobs and revised February’s estimate upwards 13,000 to 33,000, for a total of 14,000 more nonfarm...