YOUR VOICE, YOUR VOTE: Paying Your Fair Share of Taxes

Will you stop letting rich elites and giant corporations get away with not paying their fair share?
How will you ensure our tax dollars support good schools, healthy neighbors, and safe communities instead of going to big companies, their shareholders, and the wealthy?
North Carolinians with low and middle incomes pay a greater share of their incomes in state and local taxes than the wealthiest North Carolinians do. What specific policies would you pursue to fix this upside-down tax code?

Since 2013, two-thirds of the tax cuts have gone to those with incomes over $250,000. At the same time, lawmakers eliminated the state Earned Income Tax Credit for 1 million working families earning low wages.
North Carolina’s tax code is upside-down. As a share of their income, taxpayers in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution pay almost 10 percent of their income in total state and local taxes while taxpayers in the top 1 percent pay less than 6 percent.
Because wealth is concentrated in a few white households, our tax code demands Black, brown, and poor white North Carolinians pay more of their income in taxes than white taxpayers. This inequity was made worse by the constitutional change in 2018 that capped the income tax rate for people with high incomes at the arbitrary level of 7 percent.
Large, multi-state, and always profitable corporations pay a tax rate of 2.5 percent – less than half the rate for everyday taxpayers – and down from 6.9 percent. Low corporate tax rates don’t drive business decisions, but they do mean less revenue for the state.
Due to recent tax cuts for the rich and big companies, North Carolina will have $3.6 billion less in annual revenue than under the old tax code, money that could have been spent on early childhood education, affordable housing, and job training.