Wednesday, April 28, 2021

Battle over tax base

 Biden’s tax plan could hit California hard

A cosmic convergence of events in Washington and Sacramento last week demonstrated how strongly federal and state tax systems are interconnected.

President Joe Biden, it was revealed, will ask Congress this week to nearly double taxes on capital gains of the highest-income taxpayers, on top of an increase in taxes on their ordinary incomes he had proposed earlier to pay for infrastructure improvements.

California’s budget is extraordinarily dependent on those same taxpayers, with the top 1% — about 150,000 tax filers in a state of nearly 40 million — accounting for nearly 50% of the state’s general fund revenues. Much of those revenues from the state’s wealthiest residents come from their capital gains, which have increased sharply in recent years.

Econs need to pay attention. We are not one tax collector, we are competing tax collectors sharing the same tax base. 

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