Budget & Taxes

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As the Louisiana Legislature prepares to debate tax exemptions during its upcoming session, the Louisiana Budget Project recommends several reforms that would prevent the tax exemption process from being abused in the future.

A new report by the Tax Foundation warns that high state sales taxes can lead to reduced consumer spending and fewer businesses. That’s bad news for Louisiana, where the combined state and local sales tax rate is the third highest in the nation, trailing only Tennessee and Arizona.

According to data released by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in their report, “Who Pays? A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems in All 50 States,” middle and lower class families in Louisiana pay twice as much of their incomes in taxes as the wealthy under the state’s current tax structure.

A new report finds that Louisiana ranks among the worst states for income inequality, and that inequality has grown faster in Louisiana than in most other states since the late 1990s.

The average income of Louisiana households in the richest 20 percent was 8.8 times greater than incomes in the poorest 20 percent of households in the late 2000s, according to the new study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) and the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). That’s the sixth highest in the country, trailing only New Mexico, Arizona, California, Georgia and New York.