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Every year about this time homeowners receive a Form 11 from their county assessor. It’s the notice of assessment of land and structures, and it…
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Election Day is coming up – on Tuesday, May 3 – and school referendums will be on the ballot in nine school districts. It’s best…
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Here’s one way to think about property taxes: The local government sets its budget, subtracts all other tax revenue, and raises the remainder with the…
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The inflation rate was 7.5 percent from January 2021 to January 2022, the highest inflation in 40 years. It arrived suddenly and unexpectedly. A year…
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Farmland property taxes have been falling. Total property taxes paid by agricultural property owners fell 2.3 percent per year from 2017 to 2021, mostly because…
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The property tax is the biggest source of tax revenue for most Indiana local governments, and they were worried about the effect of the COVID…
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What will be the effect of the COVID recession on the property taxes that fund Indiana local governments? I’ve been thinking and writing about the…
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Americans are having fewer children. Reports this past summer showed that the birth rate dropped in 2020, to 56 births per 1,000 women age 15…
READ MOREWhere is our economy going? Let’s ask some folks whose job it is to forecast the future of the U.S. economy. How about looking at…
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The National Bureau of Economic Research is our quasi-official umpire of recessions and expansions. Last year it marked the peak of the last decade’s expansion…
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Happy belated New Year, everyone! I mean the Indiana Fiscal New Year 2022, which started on July 1. The State Budget Agency celebrates the event…
READ MOREWe’ve got an inflation problem. What should we do about it? That depends on what kind of inflation problem we’ve got. In May the consumer…
READ MOREOn April 15, toward the end of the 2021 session of the Indiana General Assembly, the State Budget Committee heard the revised revenue forecast. It…
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Suppose you’ve been prevented from buying things for a year, or maybe a decade. Now the dishwasher is on the fritz, the tires are nearly…
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Tax season is coming up. This year, federal income taxes are due on May 17th. Indiana’s state and local income taxes are due on April…
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If you want to be remembered in economics, get yourself a curve. There’s the Lorenz curve, the Laffer curve, the Kuznets curve, and, probably most…
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The December state revenue forecast for Indiana projected that individual income tax revenue would be about $6 billion this year. But Indiana uses local income…
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Can it be, is it possible, that 2021 won’t be terrible? The state revenue forecast was released on December 16 to provide a starting point…
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It was the worst of times. It was the even worse worst of times. It was the Great Recession of 2007-2009. It was the COVID…
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Inflation and Indiana School District Budgets
The inflation rate in May was 8.6 percent, the highest since the bad old days of the Great Inflation 40 years ago. We’re all paying…
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