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- PerspectivesTrade & Investment
Foreign delegations come to Washington to meet a counterparty that is not there
Twenty of the fifty-one jurisdictions in the federal collections file levy all five of the taxes it names, and two levy only two of them. The body that decides whether a foreign project works is usually a state, and it is not in the room.
- PerspectivesGovernance & Institutions
A state can only set a target on something its own accounts already count
A target can be written only on a quantity somebody already publishes, so the statistical system settles in advance which problems a government is able to own. The complication is that absence is not neutral: where no series covers a subject, the nearest published count is promoted into the gap, and the policy ends up governing whatever that count measures.
- PerspectivesRegional Development
Read a state government the way you would read a credit, not a brochure
State tax collections per resident run from 2,279 dollars in Alaska to 8,028 in Vermont, and the spread describes which layer of government collects rather than how heavily anyone is taxed. The useful questions are what the base is, what it is exposed to, and what the state does not levy at all.