I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
Blogging for Michigan quotes a Gongwer report (subscription only) on a new study by the non-partisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) that concludes that Michigan is among the states with the most regressive tax structures, resulting in the poor and the middle class paying a much higher percentage of their income in state taxes than the wealthiest residents. The quote:
Most of Michigan’s income and local taxes come from the state’s poorest residents, resulting in a regressive tax that “no one” would intentionally design, according to a report released Wednesday by the Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy.
While non-elderly residents who make less than $15,000 per year typically pay about 9 percent of their income toward taxes and those who make between $32,000 and $54,000 pay nearly 10 percent, the very rich pay about a third less, said the study, titled: Who Pays? A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems in All 50 States.
The rich, defined as those with average annual incomes of $1.1 million, typically pay about 6.4 percent toward taxes, the study said.
“No one would ever design an income tax with lower tax rates for the best-off taxpayers,” said Matthew Gardner, executive director of the institute and the study’s lead author. “But that is exactly what Michigan’s tax system overall does: it allows the very wealthiest individuals to contribute less of their income, on average, than middle and lower-income families must pay. In other words, Michigan has an unfair, regressive tax system.”
You can see the Michigan data in the study by clicking here (PDF). Despite already having a regressive tax system, the most recent budget actually makes it worse — and the Republican-controlled Senate wants to make it even worse yet by freezing the Earned Income Tax Credit for the lowest-income residents of the state while eliminating the surcharge on the Michigan Business Tax.
That change would increase the tax burden on Michigan’s poorest residents by $160 million while reducing the burden on the wealthy, yet Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop says that is the only revenue increase the Senate will even consider.
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