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Property-tax package combines EITC boost with challenges to local services
IOWA CITY, Iowa (May 16, 2013) — The nonpartisan Iowa Fiscal Partnership today released the following statement from Peter Fisher about the Iowa House-Senate conference committee report on SF295. This Read more

IFP Backgrounder Helping to Fill Gap between Income and Basic Needs for Working Families
Policy Brief (2-pg PDF) April 5, 2013
The Iowa General Assembly is once again considering expanding Iowa’s meager Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). The Cedar Rapids Read more

In over 200,000 Iowa households, working families are helped by the federal Earned Income Tax Credit. Iowa’s state EITC extends the benefit and lessens the likelihood that a low-income family will have to pay state income tax when they don’t make enough to pay federal income tax. The state EITC is 7 percent of the federal credit, and it is refundable.

Local government officials are determined to force development to happen when it can’t stand on its own, creating oversupply that hurts existing businesses. Or the private sector happily rakes in all the new incentive cash to do something it would have done anyway.

Both proposals are costly, so they affect state services to residents, and both play to a myth about Iowa taxes on business, which are below business taxes in most states already.

Tax expenditures have the same overall impact on state budget choices as do direct appropriations.

The world is upside down when state subsidies of business are presumed to be essential, and when a leading newspaper criticizes those who dare to question it.

By Mike Owen, Iowa Policy Project
It’s time for a little accountability.
Carrie Norris’ guest column (“Development initiatives have strengthened economy,” March 27) echoes business lobby cheerleading for Iowa’s research activities credit (RAC). Norris, president of the Homebuilders Association of Read more

This tax credit is used relatively little in the way one might expect of a tax credit: to reduce taxes. Rather, the credit is used mostly to provide subsidies, sometimes in the millions of dollars, to corporations that actually pay little or no income tax.

By Peter Fisher, Iowa Policy Project
Headlines in last weekend’s editions of The Gazette say so much: •  “State leaders didn’t do their homework” (Feb. 16 column by Jennifer Hemmingsen). •  “State’s business lures don’t measure the net catch” (Feb. Read more