Governor Brown Proposal to Improve CA Sales Tax

California Governor Brown's current budget proposal includes a manufacturing sales tax exemption ( pages 11 and 31 ). New businesses wou...

S. 940 - Close Big Oil Tax Loopholes Act

There is a lot of press attention on the Senate vote of May 17, 2011 on S. 940 - Close Big Oil Tax Loopholes Act. The Senate did not get th...

Four Years of Blogging!

I started this blog May 14, 2007. Some of the first topics I posted were about weaknesses in the California sales tax, such as the base bein...

State Tax Expenditures and CBPP Report

The Center for Budget & Policy Priorities has released a report - Promoting State Budget Accountability Through Tax Expenditure Reportin...

More on who benefits from tax expenditures

The talk about the $1.1 trillion of tax expenditures in the federal income tax system continues. An op ed blog in the Christian Science Moni...

California Oil Severance Tax, AB 1326 and Our Troubled Budget and Tax Systems

An editorial from NBC (5/5/11) on another proposal for an oil severance tax in California caught my attention and I posted a comment there....

Taxing Businesses and the Challenge of Lowering the Corporate Tax Rate

Talk of lowering the corporate tax rate seems to sometimes ignore the reality that most businesses operate outside of the corporate form. Th...