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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

“This report is the latest evidence of the need for reform of this poorly named ‘tax credit,’” said Charles Bruner, executive director of the Child & Family Policy Center. “The credit is used less to reduce taxes than to provide straight subsidies to big companies through the tax code, outside the budget process.”

Nothing in Tax Myths actually undercuts any of the analyses or conclusions in Selling Snake Oil. Rather, the authors’ misinterpretation and misuse of our analysis only confirms the shoddiness of the research sponsored by ALEC.