The National Priorities Project recently released two comprehensive reports that provide very useful state-by-state, as well as nation-wide, data. The Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy's Who Pays? A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems in all Fifty States shows that, on average, state and local tax systems require the poorest taxpayers to pay the highest effective tax rates.

Local news and national papers alike have been replete with the troubling real results of the growing state budget shortfalls. These stories have broken down the astounding figures – $65 billion and $70-$85 billion budget gaps in FY 2003 and FY 2004, respectively – into their real, daily effects on ordinary citizens. By now, Kentucky’s decision to release prisoners before their sentences were up has become the poster-child for desperate states and their drastic budget-balancing measures. In other similar high-profile cost-saving efforts, some school districts in Oregon and Colorado have turned to a 4-day school week; others have stopped buying new textbooks; still others have cut school athletic and marching band programs; in some districts in Oklahoma, the schools have stopped hiring substitute teachers and are, instead, looking to parents to fill in for teachers. According to the International Association of Firefighters, the state and local budget gaps have resulted in layoffs, station closings, and other reductions in staff, even as new Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge calls on local contributions for domestic security.

On January 13, 2003, Responsible Wealth held a press conference on preserving the federal estate tax, which featured William H. Gates, Sr., the co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, George Soros, chair of Soros Fund Management, Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND), and Chuck Collins, co-founder of United for a Fair Economy.

With last week’s round of self-congratulating that followed the President’s signing of an extension of federally-funded unemployment benefits, one might think that the bill’s benefits would reach all unemployed workers in the country. Indeed, the bill’s signing came just in time for those workers whose regular (or state-funded) unemployment benefits ended December 28. Without the extension of the federally-funded “Temporary Emergency Unemployment Compensation” (TEUC), these workers would have been left with no assistance. Under the renewal of the TEUC, this group of unemployed workers will receive 13 weeks of federally-funded unemployment benefits, or up to 26 weeks, if they reside in states with exceptionally high unemployment rates.