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1 Jared Walczak, Testimony on Maryland's Tax Climate before the Maryland Economic Development and Business Climate Commission [i] (2015)

handle is hein.taxfoundation/mdtxclim0001 and id is 1 raw text is: 









     Testimony on Maryland's Tax Climate before the Maryland
     Economic Development and Business Climate Commission

                                September 9, 2015

                                  Jared Walczak
                            Policy Analyst, Tax Foundation

                               TESTIMONY AS PREPARED


Chairman Augustine and members of the Maryland Economic Development and Business
Climate Commission, thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today regarding
Maryland's tax climate. My name is Jared Walczak and I'm a policy analyst with the Tax
Foundation, a nonpartisan tax policy organization based in Washington, D.C.

Three Ways of Evaluating State Tax Systems

At the Tax Foundation, we maintain three major studies looking at taxes in the fifty
states: the State Business Tax Climate Index, our State and Local Tax Burdens report, and
Location Matters. Each helps to quantify different aspects of state tax systems and, we
hope, provide a blueprint for positive tax reform.

Each study represents a different way of looking at state taxes. The Index measures tax
structure; it takes rates into account, but more than that, it reviews the neutrality,
transparency, simplicity, and stability of each state's tax structure across more than one
hundred variables. The Index is probably our best known publication, and is responsible
for the rankings you often hear cited in the media-that a state's business climate ranks
as such, or that it does this well (or poorly) for, say, the property tax component. We
provide an overall ranking as well as rankings on five sub-indices: corporate, individual,
sales, unemployment insurance, and property taxes.

But while we hope these rankings can help drive an important conversation about tax
reform, they are the beginning, not the end, of the conversation the Index is intended to
facilitate, because the Index enables state by state comparisons across a wide range of
factors: whether a state imposes a franchise tax, or employs a throwback rule, or
implements loan and interest repayment Ul taxes, caps carryforwards, indexes brackets
for inflation, and so on and so forth. And that, I think, is the real value of the Index for
policymakers: it's a roadmap. It contributes to the tax reform discussion by allowing
legislators to see how their state's tax structure compares to other states across a large
range of variables. I'll return to how Maryland does momentarily.

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