Taxes

...if the State continues to spend at the current rate Hawaii will use up its general fund carryover balances as early as 2016....

...Abercrombie And Senator David Ige Have Passed Over $833 Million Of Tax Increases Since 2011....

The middle class is most overtaxed in Arkansas, New York and Hawaii....

...poor timing can lead to tremendously bad results in Hawaii's tax system....

The government was forced to raise the tax after they noticed that bag use was increasing as consumers began absorbing the cost of the bags....

...State governments, including ours, are increasingly using targeted benefits, such as tax credits and exemptions, to attract companies....

A report by a fiscal watchdog deems Hawaii one of the worst “sinkhole” states for its growing debt burden to taxpayers....

Ige, Chun-Oakland, and Fukunaga were the three bitter-enders holding out for the full $791M in GE Tax hikes....

Even weeks after angry kupuna and union members began crowding committee hearings to protest, Takai voted 'aye' for the pension tax bill HB1092 HD1....

...find your state representative and determine how he or she voted every time the pension tax was up...

What qualifies as real estate for REIT purposes is an issue that recently has been in the news....

Mr. and Mrs. Stocker waited until the day their taxes were due....

Hawaii is making progress when it comes to passing policies to prevent and reduce suffering and death from cancer, according to a new report by the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network....

Hawaii remains among the worst 5 states for taxpayer burden of debt and continues to use overly optimistic accounting....

Airline passengers are considered an easy group to tax....

“We’ve taken literally hundreds of inquiries over the past three weeks and have explained to each taxpayer in great detail why their taxes may have increased....”

...Department of Taxation employees were able to answer the phone only 59% of the time in 2013....

...2014 April General Excise Tax (GET) collections are still down compared to the same month last year, although slightly improved on March 2014....

...Our Hawaii Supreme Court said that it reaches "virtually every economic activity imaginable"....

...The new fiscal year 2014 forecast is minus 1.8 percent, down from a negative 0.4 percent in May, a difference of about $72 million....

...“inversion” occurs when a U.S. company merges with a foreign company and moves its headquarters to the foreign country....

...Can anything be in worse condition than unfunded government pensions? Unfortunately, yes – and it’s called OPEB....

The Senate version, called the Internet Tax Freedom Forever Act, is awaiting consideration from the Senate Finance Committee....

Hawaii's mounting state debt now represents $41,300 per taxpayer, the second highest in the country....

...Hawaii's power prices are among the highest in the nation as well. Not surprisingly, one of the big reasons for this is taxation....

By the end of the 1930s, 22 states had implemented a sales tax....

...the administration “performing a $4 billion magic trick”....

...General Excise Tax collections for the first quarter of 2014 are down 4.6% in comparison to last year....

...in 1978 when Hawaii adopted its present system of conforming to the federal Internal Revenue Code, inflation adjustments were left off the table....

What it would take to help the state create a governing and regulatory climate that would bring in more revenue without raising taxes....

Hawaii TEA party leaders are outraged over the news the IRS has lost emails of its former director, Lois Lerner, during a critical time when the agency admitted to targeting conservative groups....

He had been told “they’re there” by no less than IRS Commissioner John Koskinen himself....

When you think about paying taxes, most people seem to think that it's about the same as throwing money down a rathole....

...Now every state has an income tax except for Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming. Alaska is notable in that it is the only state to repeal an existing income tax....

...between 1995 and 2000 roughly 12,000 people moved from Hawaii to Nevada, and about 1,850 moved from Nevada to Hawaii....

California is in 1st place with the highest rate of 52.89 cents per gallon, and is followed closely by New York (49.86 cents/gallon), Connecticut (49.3 cents/gallon), and Hawaii (48.05 cents/gallon)....

...The Act also increases the cap on the amount of the credit per production from $8 million to $15 million and moves the expiration date for the credit from January 1, 2016 to January 1, 2019....

We certainly hope that no one is thinking that the citizens of the reconstituted Kingdom living on state lands, and taking advantages of the benefits and services offered by the state and federal governments, will then claim they don’t have to pay for them....

Yesterday, the IRS announced it would hold off until next year on new rules that would have restricted the activities of nonprofit groups....

Of the 54 bills harmful to business that were introduced this session that we tracked, 23 bills were stopped....

...the Obama administration lied when it tried to pin the scandal on IRS employees in an Ohio branch office....

Expenditure growth has repeatedly outpaced revenue gains, resulting in recurring operating deficits and drawdowns in fund balance....

One feature of our legislative session is that a lot of work needs to get done in a short amount of time. When that happens, there are “oops” moments....

The paper provides taxpayers with concise information regarding the importance of these Hawaii tax cliffs and suggests policy changes....

...real property tax rates were reduced by 3.1 percent across the board from fiscal year 2014 rates....

This week we look at the term “stable funding source.” In business, there is no such thing....

The half-percent GET surcharge for Oahu, which by law can only be used for Honolulu's rail system, began in January 2007 and is set to expire at the end of 2022....

...You’ll never see it as a line item in the budget....