JLF board chair John Hood has a different take on the recently released Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy study:
Editorial skepticism would have served North Carolina print and broadcast outlets well over the past few days as they fell for the same old trick that the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) has been playing for years with the help of local partners such as the North Carolina Justice Center.
ITEP regularly produces a study purporting to measure the fairness of state and local tax codes. In the latest version, it presented the following breakdown of taxes paid by North Carolinians: 9.2 percent of income paid in state/local taxes by the poorest 20 percent of N.C. families, 9.1 percent paid by the next 20 percent, 9.2 percent paid by the next 20 percent, 8.8 percent paid by the next 20 percent, 7.8 percent paid by the next 15 percent, 6.8 percent paid by the next 4 percent, and 5.3 percent paid by the top 1 percent in income.
Looks positively Dickensian, doesn’t it? And it is — by which I mean that it is a fiction, not a dispassionate reporting of facts.
What puzzled me about the liberal response to the ITEP study — namely E.J. Dionne (in today’s N&R) and Doug Clark is the way they both bemoan state and local governments “shifting more of the tax burden to sales taxes, which are sharply regressive.”
Yet the N&R supported the proposed Guilford County sales tax hike on the November ballot—-ostensibly to provide additional funding for the school system —reasoning it would be a “relatively painless shared sacrifice.”
