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1 Jared Walczak, Testimony on Pennsylvania's Tax Climate before the Pennsylvania Senate Finance and Senate State Government Committees [i] (2015)

handle is hein.taxfoundation/patxclim0001 and id is 1 raw text is: Testimony on Pennsylvania's Tax Climate before the Pennsylvania Senate Finance and Senate State Government Committees August 20, 2015 Jared Walczak Policy Analyst, Tax Foundation TESTIMONY AS PREPARED Chairman Eichelberger, Chairman Folmer, and members of the Senate Finance and Senate State Government Committees, thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today regarding Pennsylvania'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. I'm also a native of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, having grown up and attended college here, so it's a privilege to be here today. I spent the summer of 2007 in Harrisburg, and often spent the evenings wandering these halls, hanging out with the press gaggle and catching the press conferences and fevered activity during that year's overtime budget negotiations. So I feel right at home here today. 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

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