The Ridgewood Blog Brings a Free Market Laissez-faire Point of View to Local, New Jersey State and National Issues.
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Trenton NJ, as April 15th , Tax Day approaches, let’s delve into some eye-opening statistics about state taxes and migration patterns. According to Self Financial, New Jersey residents bear the weight of the highest lifetime tax burden, averaging just shy of $1 million ($987,117).
Continue reading New Jersey Residents Pay Close to $1 Million in Taxes From Birth to Death
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, with Tax Day coming up on April 15 and 72% of Americans thinking their current tax rate is too high, WalletHub today released its report on the states with the Best & Worst Taxpayer Return on Investment in 2024, as well as expert commentary.
Continue reading WalletHub Study: New Jersey Is 2024’s State with the 9th Worst Taxpayer ROI
photos by Boyd Loving
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, With Tax Day approaching on April 18 and 73% of Americans thinking that the government does not spend their tax dollars wisely, the personal-finance website WalletHub today released its 2023 Tax Burden by State report .
Continue reading WalletHub Study: New Jersey Is 2023’s State with the 6th Highest Tax Burden
Continue reading WalletHub Study: New Jersey Has the 9th Highest Tax Rates in the Country
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
With Tax Day looming and 74% of people disapproving of how the government has used tax dollars during the COVID-19 pandemic, WalletHub today released its 2021 Taxpayer Survey, as well as its yearly report on the States with the Highest & Lowest Tax Rates (accompanying videos included) in order to help people better understand this confusing time of year. You can find highlights from both below, followed by the full list of WalletHub’s 2021 taxpayer resources.
Continue reading WalletHub Study : New Jersey Has the 10th Highest Tax Rates in the Country
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, As Tax Day approaches, about eight in ten New Jerseyans feel they pay too much in taxes and are not happy with what the state government is doing about the affordability of living in the Garden State, according to the latest Rutgers-Eagleton Poll, conducted in collaboration with the New Jersey Business & Industry Association (NJBIA).
Eighty-two percent of residents think they pay too much in taxes for what they get, and large majorities believe the taxes they pay – namely, property taxes (79 percent), the 41.4 cent gas tax (77 percent), and the state income tax (62 percent) – are unfair. Only the sales tax sits well with residents, with over half (58 percent) saying the tax is reasonable.
Continue reading New Jerseyans Feel Overtaxed, Unloved and Dissatisfied With State Government
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, With Tax Day fast approaching and the new tax code taking effect this year, the personal-finance website WalletHub today released its 2019 Tax Burden by State report as well as accompanying videos, along with its 2019 Tax Facts infographic.
In order to determine which states tax their residents most aggressively, WalletHub compared the 50 states based on the three components of state tax burden — property taxes, individual income taxes, and sales and excise taxes — as a share of total personal income.
Tax Burden in New Jersey (1=Highest, 25=Avg.):
For the full report, please visit:
https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-highest-lowest-tax-burden/20494/
April 17, 2018
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, Tom Kean: While Today is Tax Day, New Jerseyans Won’t Celebrate Tax Freedom Day Until May 3rd .
Warns Murphy’s Billions in New Taxes Will Push Tax Freedom Day for New Jerseyans Even Later .
On Tax Day 2018, Senate Republican Leader Tom Kean warned that New Jersey residents will have to work longer to pay their tax bills if billions in tax increases proposed by Governor Phil Murphy are enacted.
“Although today is Tax Day, the day that income taxes must be filed, New Jerseyans actually will have to work through May 3rd to pay their combined federal, state, and local property tax bills for the year,” said Kean. “If Murphy’s billions in tax increases are enacted, New Jersey workers will have to work even further into the year just to pay their taxes.”
The Tax Foundation measures Tax Freedom Day as the point into the year that taxpayers must work to cover the cost of all of the taxes they pay.
Residents of several states with low tax burdens celebrated Tax Freedom Day in the first week of April, a month before New Jersey residents will get to celebrate, and 30 states have celebrated Tax Freedom Day by today, April 17th.
Only New Yorkers will have to work further into 2018 than New Jerseyans to pay their tax bills for the year.
Kean said the $1.7 billion in tax increases proposed by Governor Murphy would put New Jersey in a race for last place with the Empire State.
“The higher income taxes, increased sales taxes, and new taxes on sharing services like Uber and Lyft that Governor Murphy’s wants to implement would place New Jerseyans at serious risk of having the absolute worst tax burden in the nation,” added Kean. “We’re going to fight these tax increases. Unlike Governor Murphy, we want New Jerseyans to spend less time working to support big government and more time working to the benefit of their own families.
Mark J. Perry@Mark_J_Perry
April 14, 2016 11:38 am
Tomorrow is April 15, which means we are approaching the deadline for filing (and paying) our federal and state income taxes (extended to April 18 this year because of Emancipation Day), and that means it’s time for my annual post at tax time to help put things in perspective.
1. Some Historical Perspective. “In the beginning” when the US federal income tax was first introduced in 1913, it used to be a lot, lot simpler and a lot easier to file taxes; so easy in fact that it was basically like filling out your federal tax return on a postcard.
For example, page 1 of the original IRS 1040 income tax form from 1913 appears above. There were only four pages in the original 1040 form, including: two pages of worksheets, the actual one-page 1040 form above, and only one page of instructions, view all four pages here. In contrast, just the current 1040 instructions for 2014, without any forms, runs 105 pages (down from 207 pages for 2013).
Individual federal income tax rates started at 1% in 1913, and the maximum marginal income tax rate was only 7% on incomes above $500,000 ($12.02 million in today’s dollars). The personal exemption in 1913 was $3,000 for individuals ($72,000 in today’s dollars) and $4,000 for married couples ($96,000 in today’s dollars), meaning that very few Americans had to pay federal income tax since the average income in 1913 was only about $750. The Tax Foundation has historical federal income tax rates for every year between 1913 and 2013 here for tax brackets expressed in both nominal dollars and inflation-adjusted dollars.
https://www.aei.org/publication/some-thoughts-facts-and-charts-for-tax-day-bring-us-back-to-1913-or-better-yet-bring-us-back-to-1912/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=perrytaxday16
9:00 AM, APR 22, 2015 • BY JOHN MCCORMACK
If you tried to contact the IRS with a question about your taxes this year, chances are you didn’t get a response. The IRS estimated that it would only answer 17 million of the 49 million calls received this filing season. Taxpayers lucky enough to have the IRS answer their calls waited an average of 34.4 minutes for assistance–nearly double the wait time last year (18.7 minutes).
IRS Commissioner John Koskinen has blamed the IRS’s “abysmal” customer service on congressional budget cuts–funding is down $1.2 billion from its 2010 peak–but a new congressional report points the finger back at the IRS. While congressional funding for the IRS remained flat from 2014 to 2015, the IRS diverted $134 million away from customer service to other activities.
In addition to the $11 billion appropriated by Congress, the IRS takes in more than $400 million in user fees and may allocate that money as it sees fit. In 2014, the IRS allocated $183 million in user fees to its customer service budget, but allocated just $49 million in 2015–a 76 percent cut.
Commissioner Koskinen will appear before the House Ways and Means Committee this morning, one week after the federal tax filing deadline, and he can expect to be asked why the IRS cut its own customer service budget and continues to spend money on other questionable activities.
The report notes that Koskinen reinstated bonuses weeks after his appointment, has allowed IRS employees to spend roughly 500,000 work hours on union activities, and failed to collect delinquent taxes owed by federal employees. The tax agency has also been strained by Obamacare. According to the report, the IRS has spent “over $1.2 billion on the President’s health care law to date, with a planned expenditure this year of an additional $500 million.”
https://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/report-irs-deliberately-cut-its-own-customer-service-budget_927141.html
April 15, 2015 – 4:35 PM
CNSNews.com) – The federal government has set an all-time record for the amount of inflation-adjusted tax revenue brought into the federal Treasury from the beginning of the fiscal year through the April 15 tax-filing deadline.
As of the close of business on April 14, the Treasury had brought in a record $1,477,901,000,000 since fiscal 2015 started on Oct. 1, 2014, according the Daily Treasury Statement released this afternoon.
We won’t know how much additional tax revenue the Treasury hauled in today until it releases its next daily statement tomorrow at 4:00 p.m. But every dollar of it will add to the new record.
https://cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/1477901000000tax-day-tax-record
By Thomas Fletcher – – Tuesday, April 14, 2015
With the federal budget debate underway in Washington, both political parties are certainly sparring over different fiscal visions for the country. There is, however, a chance for rare bi-partisan agreement: repealing the federal death tax.
This unpopular tax has long had an adverse impact on small, family business owners who want the next generation to continue the family legacy. Currently, the federal government seizes over 40 percent of an individual’s estate when they die. While the President wants to destroy so many of those legacies and raise taxes, Congress has the chance to go in a different direction.
Federal lawmakers should look to the states for guidance. While twenty-one of them carry an additional death tax on their books, many states have reformed and in some cases eliminated the death tax in recent years. States such as Oklahoma, Ohio, and North Carolina simply abolished their death taxes. Other states like New York have raised their exemption to match current federal law, although the New York exemption is a phase-in and will match the federal level by 2019.
Supporters often claim that the death tax is vital for revenue, but in reality it is a poor way for a state to raise revenue and has led people to leave a given state. According to a study by the Ocean State Research Institute, the death tax was the primary factor in residents leaving Rhode Island. The study found 107,086 or (one in ten) residents left the state between 1991 and 2009. While the state collected $341.3 million in estate tax receipts, it lost over $500 million in other taxes due to people migrating to other states.
photo by ArChick
Tax Day gets complicated for same-sex couples in states that don’t recognize their marriages
By Stephen Ohlemacher, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — A necessary burden for most Americans, Tax Day is an accounting nightmare for thousands of gay and lesbian couples as they wrestle with the uneven legal status of same-sex marriage in the United States.
They live in a country that recognizes their marriages, but some reside in the 13 states that do not, an issue that will be argued before the Supreme Court later this month.
At tax time, and Wednesday is the filing deadline, it gets complicated because most state income tax returns use information from a taxpayer’s federal return.
Straight couples simply copy numbers from one form to another. But that doesn’t work for same-sex couples reporting combined incomes, deductions and exemptions on their federal tax returns. These couples must untangle their finances on their state returns, where they are still considered single.
“We’re adults, we’re contributing to the welfare of society and yet, here’s this one thing that just reaches up every year and kind of slaps us in the face,” said Brian Wilbert, an Episcopal priest who lives in Oberlin, a small college town in northern Ohio.
Wilbert married his husband, Yorki Encalada, in 2012, at a ceremony in upstate New York. He is filing a joint federal tax return for the second time this year. But Ohio, which doesn’t recognize same-sex marriages, requires the couple to file their state tax returns as if they were single.
“It may not be the most burning thing,” Wilbert said. “But as we think about equality and marriage equality, this is an important thing because it’s part of what couples do.”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tax-day-extra-difficult-many-130932026.html
Pondering the complexity of the tax code on Tax Day
By SCOTT GARRETT
As you finalize this year’s tax returns, I hope you realize you are not the only one feeling frustrated. In fact, Albert Einstein once quipped that “The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.” Interestingly, this wasn’t always the case.
In 1913, the tax code was a far more manageable 400 pages. When Einstein passed away in 1955, the U.S. tax code had grown to about 14,000 pages — 10 times as long as the novel “War and Peace.”
Today, now eclipsing 74,000 pages, the code is more than five times as large as it was in Einstein’s time. For those of you doing the math that means since its adoption in 1913, policymakers have added an average of two new pages to the code every day for the last 100 years.
Besides causing a headache for you, your loved ones and your neighbors, the complicated tax code is a colossal drag on our nation’s economy. According to a 2013 report published by Mercatus Center scholar Jason Fichtner, “Americans spent more than 6 billion hours complying with the tax code in 2011.” He writes, “The compliance burden results in estimates of foregone economic growth from $148 billion to $609 billion annually.”
A simpler, fairer and flatter tax structure is the solution to this problem. It is time for us to simplify every Americans’ tax filing, saving time and hard-earned money, and creating much-needed certainty for job creators and small business owners.
Before the House Ways and Means Committee last April, Sam Griffith, president and chief executive officer of National Jet Co., said “the current tax code is a maze of mismatched provisions which provide disincentives to grow our businesses and hire new employees.” The 2013 Small Business Survey compiled by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has found that eight out of 10 small businesses support reforming the tax code.
State tax policy is a good, small-scale example of what can happen on the federal level. The governors of Texas, Wisconsin and Indiana, for example, have openly and actively recruited out-of-state businesses to relocate and enjoy their states’ lower taxes and less burdensome regulations. It’s time for the federal government to follow suit.
Just like the states near Wisconsin, Texas, and Indiana, the United States loses business to other countries because of our high, overly complex tax code. But, rather than working to enact across-the-board reform, our policymakers just insert exemptions or “carve-outs” for politically favored businesses.
These tax carve-outs are unfair to Main Street coffee shops, florists, local factories and any business that doesn’t get the same kind of treatment. As we know, when the government picks winners and losers, we end up with stories like that of Flabeg Solar U.S. Corp. — the failed solar energy company that cost the American taxpayers more than $10 million.
Americans want to be treated fairly and they want to earn a living to support their families. The tax code is crying out for significant, substantive reform. Meaningful, structural reform will free up Americans’ time and money so they can put it into greater creativity and productivity.
With comprehensive tax reform, we have a chance to reignite the entrepreneurial, hardworking American spirit that is being stifled by mountains of antiquated tax policies that no one — even a world-renowned physicist — can understand.
U.S. Rep. Scott Garrett represents the 5th Congressional District of New Jersey, which includes most of Warren County.
62 Percent of Americans Say They Favor a Flat Tax
Emily Ekins|Apr. 15, 2014 9:05 am
The latest Reason-Rupe poll asked Americans if they would support or oppose changing the federal tax system to a flat tax, where everyone pays the same percentage of his or her income, finding that 62 percent favor the flat tax and 33 percent are opposed. When asked where they would set the flat tax, the aveage response was 15 percent.
This reflects another recent Reason-Rupe poll finding that 67 percent of Americans say it is “not the responsibility of the government to reduce the differences in income between people with high incomes and those with low incomes,” while 29 percent say it is.
Strong support for a flat tax extends across income groups (62 percent) among those making less than $30,000 a year and 73 percent among those making more than $110,000 a year. Similarly across education groups and age groups, 6 in 10 say they support the flat tax.
Support for a flat tax extends beyond partisanship, with 66 percent of Republicans, 68 percent of independents, and 52 percent of Democrats in support. Nevertheless, Democrats are more likely to oppose the flat tax (43 percent) compared to Republicans (29 percent) and independents (29 percent).
Americans who say the less government the better and that the free market can better solve problems than a strong government, favor a flat tax by a margin of nearly 50 points (roughly 72 to 25 percent). However, those who think government should be doing more and that we need a strong government to solve problems favor a flat tax by only 8 points (roughly 51 to 45 percent).
https://reason.com/poll/2014/04/15/62-percent-of-americans-say-they-favor-a
