Current Themes
Event Recap
US states hand out massive tax breaks every year to advance policy goals, such as aiding low-income families, spurring business investment and job creation, or mirroring the federal tax code. Known broadly as tax expenditures, these exemptions, credits, abatements, and other measures reduce state revenues by an estimated $1 trillion a year, almost three times their 2021 total state expenditures on education.
Such tax expenditures, which often suffer from lax government oversight, may be leaving states short on revenue at time when the effects of climate change and the cost of deferred maintenance means that they will need to spend more on infrastructure now and in the decades ahead.
Join us for a Special Briefing to discuss a new Volcker Alliance issue paper addressing these concerns, Relinquished Revenue: Evaluating the Impact of State Tax Expenditures. Our panel of experts will include the paper's authors:
- Matt Fabian, partner, and Lisa Washburn, managing director, Municipal Market Analytics;
- Jonathan Ball, legislative fiscal analyst, State of Utah;
- Tim Bartik, senior economist, W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research; and
- Arlene Martinez, deputy executive director, Good Jobs First.
Moderated by William Glasgall, Volcker Alliance senior director, public finance and Penn IUR fellow, and Susan Wachter, co-director of Penn IUR, this briefing is the fifty-third in a series of sixty-minute online conversations featuring experts from the national research networks of the Volcker Alliance and Penn IUR, along with other leading academics, economists, and federal, state, and local leaders.
Special Briefings are made possible by funding from The Century Foundation, the Volcker Alliance, and members of the Penn IUR Advisory Board.
Recordings of the entire Special Briefings series are available on the Volcker Alliance website: SPECIAL BRIEFING SERIES ARCHIVE.
Be sure to subscribe to the Special Briefing podcast, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn, iHeart Radio and more.
Also, be sure to subscribe to the Volcker Alliance newsletter and Penn IUR newsletter.
