election 2016

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The Week in Public Finance: What a Trump Presidency Could Mean for State and Local Finances and More

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BY  | NOVEMBER 11, 2016

What a Trump Presidency Could Mean for State and Local Finances

An early review of Donald Trump's health-care and trade policies reveals some potentially bad news for state and local governments. According to Fitch Ratings, Trump's proposals would "significantly lower federal transfers to state budgets and could negatively affect economic growth and revenues."

Specifically, Trump has proposed converting Medicaid funding into a block grant program, which Fitch says would lead to much lower federal funding for the states. A Congressional Budget Office (CBO) assessment of earlier Medicaid block grant proposals projected declines of between 4 and 23 percent in federal funding over 10 years.

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The Week in Public Finance: School Funding's Lost Decade, Teacher Pension Pressures and More

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BY  | OCTOBER 21, 2016

A Lost Decade for Public School Kids

New data this week shows that nearly half of all states are providing less in per-pupil funding today than they were before the recession in 2008. Taking inflation into account, eight of the 23 states have cut funding per student by about 10 percent or more, according to a report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).

What's more, five of those eight -- Arizona, Kansas, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin -- have cut education funding while also cutting income taxes, resulting in tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue each year.

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Would Eliminating Taxes on Services Help or Hurt the Poor?

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As states increasingly look to tax services, Missouri voters can be the first to keep that from ever happening. How that would impact consumers is unclear.
BY  | AUGUST 31, 2016

States have struggled to keep up the same revenue growth as they experienced before the recession. One big reason is that their earnings from sales taxes are declining. That's because these days, consumers are spending far more on services -- most of which aren’t taxed -- than goods, which are.

To remedy the situation, lawmakers have tried and had varying degrees of success expanding the sales tax to services. Massachusetts passed a tax on the cloud and quickly repealed it after the tech industry complained. Pennsylvania enacted the so-called "Netflix tax" on streaming video services. Washington, D.C., added a long list of services to be taxed: yoga, tanning and bowling, to name a few.