 | Growth & Justice presents PowerPoint on tax policy: principles for reform that make system fairer for families, better for business growth
10/2/2008 11:06 AMGrowth & Justice President Dane Smith recently delivered a presentation to the Governor’s 21 Century Tax Commission, which is an update of our 2005 project, Rethinking Minnesota’s Taxes. The revised PowerPoint, “Re-Rethinking Minnesota’s Taxes” was prepared by Charlie Quimby, Growth & Justice Communications Fellow and a former business owner
The commission, comprised largely of business representatives and tax experts, is charged with making recommendations to improve and modernize the state’s tax code for businesses, specifically to encourage economic growth in a fast-changing, highly competitive and global economy.
“We tried to present a bird’s-eye economic perspective, not just focusing on the pluses or minuses of this tax or that tax,” Smith said.
“We used the PowerPoint to point out that Minnestoa’s state-local tax system is getting more regressive, and that households at the very top pay just 9 percent of their income in state-local taxes, while almost everybody else pays 12 percent. We pointed out that the state income tax cuts of a decade ago, followed by the ‘no new taxes’ orthodoxy of the last six years has resulted in a dramatic diminishing of valuable public investment in our state.
“We pointed out that this experiment has coincided with Minnesota under-performing the national economy for the first time in decades. And we made the case that there is a consensus around re-investing in education, in transportation infrastructure, in health-care, and in the environment. We pointed out that a fairer income tax, with a restoration of the rates at the top incomes, is the fairest solution and good for business in the long run.
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