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Archive for the ‘Tax’ Category

Reduce Speculation and Limit Gentrification: Penalize Absentee/Pied-à-Terre Owners

Friday, June 20th, 2014

While cities like Chicago, Austin, and Seattle can typically stave off drastic price increases by just building enough housing to meet demand, that’s not always possible for world cities because demand isn’t just local, or even national — it’s global, and in an era of growing inequality the demand for luxury investment properties and pieds-à-terre is vast. That demand is an obstacle to providing an adequate supply of affordable, middle-class housing, but it needn’t be. If harnessed appropriately, it could even be a strength.

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States’ Fiscal Initiatives Offer a Solution to the Impending Trust Fund Shortfall

Friday, June 6th, 2014

Innovation Newsbriefs
Vol. 25, No. 8

While transportation stakeholders and the Washington press corps are agonizing about the impending Highway Trust Fund shortfall and its impact on the federal transportation program, they are ignoring developments outside the Beltway that go a long way toward mitigating the prospective funding shortage. For in fact, individual states, far from standing idly by, are responding to the fiscal uncertainties in Washington by stepping up and augmenting their transportation budgets.

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Hopes for a Long-Term Transportation Bill Are Fading

Tuesday, May 27th, 2014

Innovation Newsbriefs
Vol. 25, No. 7
With federal transportation spending outpacing tax receipts by some $1.25 billion/month, the cash balance of the Federal Highway Trust is drawing perilously close to the point where the U.S Department of Transportation will be obliged to institute cash management strategies—such as slowing down or delaying state reimbursements — to keep the Trust Fund account solvent. Based on current spending and revenue trends, this point —a cash balance of $4 billion in the Highway Account —will be reached in late July according to the latest U.S. DOT estimate However, CBO estimates that “both the highway account and the transit account will end the end of the fiscal year with a positive balance” according to an April 14 memo from the Congressional Budget Office (Subject: CBO’s Highway Trust Fund Runs, April Baseline)

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The GROW AMERICA Act: Response from the Infra Community

Tuesday, May 6th, 2014

On Friday, May 2, the Obama Administration and the U.S. Department of Transportation released the GROW AMERICA Act, a $300-billion transportation bill aiming to provide comprehensive solutions to our nation’s transportation woes. According to the GROW AMERICA fact sheet. Despite the bill’s cumbersome acronym (Generating Renewal, Opportunity, and Work with Accelerated Mobility, Efficiency, and Rebuilding of Infrastructure and Communities throughout America) the bill promises to resolve a slew of nagging transportation problems, from environmental impact to financing.

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Rethinking the Way Transportation Infrastructure Is Funded

Friday, February 14th, 2014

Innovation Newsbriefs
Vol. 25, No. 3A
It may come as a surprise to you, but there is a quiet revolution in transportation funding underway these days. Faced with a depleted Highway Trust Fund and uncertain prospects for more money from a deficit-conscious Congress, many states are taking matters into their own hands and aggressively pursuing more fiscal independence.

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Gas Taxes and User Fees Pay for Only Half of State and Local Roads

Friday, January 10th, 2014
Table 1: User Fees and User Taxes as a Percent of State-Local Transportation Spending, 2011

TAX FOUNDATION
The lion’s share of transportation funding should come from user fees (amounts a user pays directly for a service the user receives, such as tolls) and user taxes (amounts a user pays, based on usage, for transportation, such as fuel and motor vehicle license taxes).[2] When road funding comes from a mix of tolls and gasoline taxes, the people that use the roads bear a sizeable portion of the cost. By contrast, funding transportation out of general revenue makes roads “free,” and consequently, overused or congested—often the precise problem transportation spending programs are meant to solve.

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On the Performance of the U.S. Transportation System: Caution Ahead

Thursday, October 3rd, 2013
Caution Ahead

BROOKINGS INSTITUTION by Clifford Winston Introduction Transportation is a friction—a cost in both money and time—that must be incurred by individuals and firms to complete almost any market transaction. An efficient and extensive transportation system greatly enriches the standard of living in modern society by reducing the cost of nearly everything in the economy; expanding […]

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INVEST BUT REFORM: Establish a National Infrastructure Bank

Monday, August 26th, 2013

BROOKINGS INSTITUTION
Congress should establish a National Infrastructure Bank (NIB) capitalized with the proceeds from a onetime repatriation tax holiday. The primary barrier to an NIB—a targeted mechanism for financing infrastructure projects of national significance— is finding a way to build the loan fund. Untaxed overseas corporate profits, which currently provide little support to overstretched federal budgets, represent an untapped revenue source that could quickly fund an NIB, without a direct appropriation.

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Effects of U.S. Tax Policy on Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Thursday, July 18th, 2013
Effects of U.S. Tax Policy on Greenhouse Gas Emissions

NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES Chapter 1: Overview and Scope of the Study Legislative Background to the StudyIn 2008, Congress directed the U.S. Department of the Treasury to work with the National Academies to undertake “a comprehensive review of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to identify the types of and specific tax provisions that have […]

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Can-Do States

Wednesday, July 17th, 2013

Innovation NewsBriefsVol. 24, No. 9 Recently, Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV) called for a $5.5 billion emergency federal program “to fix the nation’s backlog of deficient and structurally obsolete bridges”  (H.R. 2428).  He was responding to the well- publicized collapse of the  I-5 bridge  in Washington State . “It’s an emergency out there,” Rahall proclaimed at […]

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