That’s according to Santiago Seage, chief executive of the Spanish-owned Abengoa Solar, which owns the embattled project. Seage told the trade journal Recharge News that without an extension of the federal Investment Tax Credit for solar plants, his company won’t have the security it needs to invest in building the project.
Mr. LePage, who just began his second term, would lower top individual and corporate income taxes, broaden the number of goods and services covered by the sales tax and offer tax credits for low-income residents. He said his plan would make Maine more competitive and attract more young families to the nation’s grayest state
One of the goals of tax reform is to improve the competitiveness of U.S. businesses and grow the economy. A promising way to do that is by lowering taxes on saving and investment through business tax reform. Much time is devoted to improving the corporate side of the tax code, but corporate-only business tax reform misses a significant portion of business activity.
The United States currently has a large number of pass-through businesses, or businesses that pay their taxes through the individual income tax code rather than through the corporate code. These sole proprietorships, S corporations, and partnerships make up the vast majority of businesses and more than 60 percent of net business income in America. In addition, pass-through businesses account for more than half of the private sector workforce and 37 percent of total private sector payroll. Pass-through businesses are represented in all industries in the United States.
Determined to shed long-term state debt, Gov. Jerry Brown wants the state to cease issuing K-12 school construction bonds, leaving school districts to pay the tab for building and renovating schools. A coalition of school districts and the building industry has responded with plans to go straight to voters with a $9 billion state school building bond in 2016.
California’s watchdog agency recommended on Wednesday that the legislature repeal a new law that caps the size of school district budgets, warning that over 91 percent of the state’s districts would have violated the new rules if they had been in place in 2014.
All of that notwithstanding, Proposition 2 is not the best solution to revenue volatility, which is caused by a too-high reliance on personal income taxes from a relative handful of wealthy Californians whose incomes from stocks and other capital assets go up and down like yo-yos.
Much noise has been made over the years about California’s unfriendly tax environment. But an ongoing mantra at Beacon Economics is that California is not so much a ‘high’ tax state as a ‘dumb’ tax state. In other words, it is the structure of revenues that creates the problem, not simply the quantity being collected. This is important because it suggests that if we make certain logical changes to the structure of taxes in the state, it could simultaneously make California more business friendly while helping to cure the long-term deficit issues we still face – despite the current ‘balanced’ budget.
Even after California’s most massive public pension system reported that it’s regaining ground lost in the recession, many Orange County cities continue to grapple with painful shortfalls, especially the older burgs sporting their own police and fire departments. The newer, contract-heavy cities look lean and mean by contrast.
In the Governor’s 2015-16 budget proposal, the administration raises its revenue estimates, and this results in a multibillion-dollar influx of new funds for schools and community colleges under the Proposition 98 minimum funding guarantee. The Governor’s plan identifies cost pressures and budget risks in health and human services programs, and new program commitments outside of Proposition 98 are limited. The Governor’s proposal to pay off the state’s retiree health liabilities over the next few decades would, if funded, address the last of state government’s large unaddressed liabilities. We conclude the state likely will collect more tax revenue in 2014-15 than the administration now estimates. Barring a sustained stock market drop, an additional 2014-15 revenue gain of $1 billion to $2 billion seems likely in addition to the Governor’s budget projection. Even bigger gains of a few billion dollars more are possible in 2014-15. These additional 2014-15 revenues will go largely or entirely to schools and community colleges and could result in a few billion dollars of higher ongoing state payments to schools. Whether tax revenues grow further, stagnate, or, in the worst case, decline in 2015-16 will depend in large part on trends in volatile capital gains and business income.
But that was then. What passes for oversight these days are often brief, highly orchestrated hearings that curry favor with some interest group.
Sometime in the next few weeks, the lead contractor for the Bay Bridge’s new eastern span will finally declare that the most complex public works project in California history is done — and state and local authorities will be solely responsible for a landmark beset by problems that trace back more than 16 years, to the day a handful of experts picked a design that bordered on the experimental.
Housing developers are pushing a state bond because, without it, their share of school construction costs — passed on to home buyers — would double. School construction has been funded one-third each by local property taxpayers, developers and the state.
Looking ahead, we should be spending at least $100 billion more on maintenance, repair and reconstruction over the next decade.
Federal spending on such side projects has increased 38% since 2008, while highway spending is flat. Here’s what the politicians won’t say: Simply using the taxes that are supposed to pay for highways to, well, pay for highways makes the HTF 98% solvent for the next decade, no tax increase necessary.
Those additional pension costs steadily increase until 2046. That year, districts are expected to spend an additional $9.3 billion over what they would have under the prior structure. The state would contribute an additional $2.2 billion that year, and teachers would chip in $1 billion.