Tax and Budget

With a rise in the sale of electric vehicles, states lose some of the revenue that they’ve long relied on to pay for transportation projects: taxes on motor fuels.

In Minnesota, the chances of a local school district getting the money it wants to build a new facility or improve existing buildings can depend greatly on where it is located:

The president's federal budget was released May 23 and the analysis of winners and losers began practically before the ink was dry, although almost all of Washington seemed to agree the budget was dead on arrival. Cuts to the Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, alone total $616 billion over the next ten years. The budget also envisions saving $250 billion from partly repealing and replacing the 2010 health care law. Taken together, these Medicaid cuts are nearly half the nondefense discretionary funding cuts. To further understand just how important federal Medicaid funds are to states, CSG looked at 2017 federal funding flowing to the states. According to Federal Funds Information for the States, or FFIS, data, the federal Medicaid funding for 2017 is more than 50 percent of all federal grant funds flowing to states in all but four states.

A quarter-century has passed since a U.S. Supreme Court decision limited the ability of states to collect taxes from the remote sales of out-of-state retailers. Legislators wanting to secure that taxing authority — which they say is critical to maintaining state revenue bases and helping brick-and-mortar businesses — believe a reversal of Quill Corp. v. North Dakota may finally be on the horizon.

“I do believe Quill will get overturned; it’s just a matter of time,” North Dakota Sen. Dwight Cook says. And one of the U.S. states most reliant on the sales tax as a revenue source, South Dakota, might bring the case that “kills Quill.”

A year ago, South Dakota lawmakers passed a bill requiring most retailers without a physical presence in the state to remit the state’s sales tax. SB 106 applies to sellers with 200 or more annual transactions in South Dakota or whose gross revenue from sales in the state exceed $100,000. This year, Indiana (HB 1129) and North Dakota (SB 2298) passed “economic nexus” laws of their own.

How much states spend on children’s health, education, income supports and social services differs greatly according to a just-released Urban Institute report, titled Unequal Playing Field.

The top spending state – Vermont – charted per child expenditures of $13,430, three times as much as Utah’s per child spending of $4,594. The national average was $7,923. Spending in each state was  adjusted for the state cost of living.

At least 20 states, including five in the Midwest (see map), have enacted taxes on the “streaming” of media, such as music, movies or TV shows.