People-Powered Prosperity

Fully funding our state’s shared priorities requires balancing Georgia’s state budget with sustainable revenue sources that fairly tax residents across the state. It is also important to reverse tax policies that cause the lowest-income families to pay the highest percentage of their earnings in state and local taxes and to make certain that the state avoids costly and inefficient loopholes or unnecessary tax breaks.

By modernizing the state’s tax code and implementing common-sense policies with demonstrated success in other states across the nation, Georgia’s leaders can both increase the state’s ability to fund its priorities and more equitably tax households. In order to achieve this goal, state leaders can:

• Preserve and strengthen the income tax for households and corporations by defending against cuts that largely benefit top earners and scaling back the double deduction to stabilize revenues and recover quickly during times of economic downtown
• Evaluate tax breaks for big business in order to trim back those that do not deliver enough benefit to offset the state’s lost revenue
• Increase the cigarette tax to the national average in order to raise over $500 million in annual revenues while discouraging tobacco use
• Extend the sales tax to cover all online purchases and some services