About 45 years have passed since a U.S. state last eliminated its income tax on wages and salaries. But with recent actions in Mississippi and Kentucky, two states now are on a path to do so, if their economies keep growing.
The push to zero out the income tax is perhaps the most aggressive example of a tax-cutting trend that swept across states as they rebounded from the COVID-19 pandemic with surging revenues and historic surpluses.
But it comes during a time of greater uncertainty for states, as they wait to see whether President Donald Trump’s cost cutting and tariffs lead to a reduction in federal funding for states and a downturn in the overall economy.
Some fiscal analysts also warn the repeal of income taxes could leave states reliant on other levies, such as sales taxes, that disproportionately affect the poor.
Joining the ranks with… Washington state?
Recently though, Washington finally passed a Capital Gains tax, still no conventional income tax, though. Washington has one of the most regressive tax structures in the country for being otherwise so progressive.
Washington state is basically a wonderland for giant megacorps hiding under a trench coat that’s made of rainbows and gentrification.
MSFTs main campus just literally is the size of a city.
They literally have their own private bus system that gets employees all around the Seattle/Bellevue/Redmond region to and from their main , city sized campus, if not other campuses as well by now.
Boeing cannot be allowed to fail or even held accountable no matter how much and how hard they fuck up… because manufacturing jobs and national defense.
Amazon just bought a huge chunk of Seattle, basically downtown Seattle, and owns nearly every building in… something like an 6 block by 6 block foot print.
The most actually progressive thing about the state’s economic structure is that it gets a huge amount of its power generation from dams, actual renewable energy, has very good water management, and comparatively good public transit for the population size of its cities, at least compared to other states. Yay light rail, but also Seattle is one of the hilliest cities in the country with extreme grades and elevation changes, so uh, good luck commuter bikers.
But uh yeah, cost of living is insane, housing prices are insane, and so far nobody seems to have any actual plan to address that beyond subsidizing a few extra hundred apartment units a year in Seattle such that they’d be affordable to a family making 90k a year, when they’d normally only be affordable to family making 140k a year.
When Seattle says they’re making ‘affordable housing’, that means affordable to median wage workers… not affordable to the … something like 40% of the population that is moderately to significantly poor.
You could completely solve homelessness in the state with something like a 0.5% tax on revenues of the top 100 corps by revenue in the state.
No one has ever even proposed anything like this, to my knowledge.
Sales tax suck here in Washington, we’ll and so does property taxes. I’m paying $9k property tax for a house that I bought in 2020 for $605k that’s now valued at $850k. I went from $3k to $9k in property tax in 5 years. I’d willing do a mix tax because we have a fuckton of million and billionaires and 10.6% sales tax on everything fucking sucks.