Happy birthday, TCJA. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act became law on December 22, 2017. NPR takes a look at its first two years. Overall, tax revenues have declined as a share of the economy in 2018 and 2019. The economy grew 2.9 percent in 2018, just as it did in 2015. And now, President Trump is teasing the idea of another round of tax cuts, after the 2020 election, much like he promised before the 2018 midterm elections. There have been no subsequent tax cuts.
For big corporations, will going public about taxes paid become the norm? Maybe. The Organization for Economic and Cooperative Development requires detailed reporting by companies on revenue, profit, taxes and other business details in the countries in which they operate. The companies rarely make that information public, but The Wall Street Journal reports (paywall) on Royal Dutch Shell’s decision to do so as part of its overall effort to present itself as forward-thinking, transparent and socially-minded. Will other companies follow its lead, or wait to be pushed to do? European Union countries are considering a requirement that all companies with total revenue of more than €750 million ($834 million) in the EU to publish the information annually.
US Steel closes Michigan mill, to lay off 1,545 workers. After the first round of tariffs on imported steel, domestic steel prices increased and President Trump said the tariffs were working to rebuild the steel industry. But US Steel, predicting major losses nearly twice what analysts predicted in the final quarter of the year, will close a steel mill near Detroit and lay off 1,545 workers. It will shift steel production to an existing plant in Gary, Indiana, where both the city and state have offered the company tax breaks to retain at least 3,875 jobs.
Need up-to-date information on state fiscal performance? TPC’s State and Local Finance Initiative is the only source, regularly collecting fiscal data from all 50 states and updating older official statistics to reflect actual state numbers. SLFI offers a subscription service to any of its six databases for monthly tax revenue, quarterly tax revenue, personal income tax revenue, comparisons of actual revenue collections to the initial forecasts, annual state and local government gambling revenue, and monthly marijuana tax revenue. SLFI also produces monthly state revenue highlights that accompany database subscriptions. For a limited time, you can access monthly state revenue highlights at no charge.
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