US States Seek to Ease Inflation Burden With Direct Payments to Residents
The proposals come at a time when many states actually have too much money on their hands because of billions of dollars in federal pandemic aid and ballooning tax revenue.It’s also happening as the war in Ukraine has compounded soaring prices for fuel and other essentials.
Inflation boosted the typical family’s food expenses by nearly $590 last year, according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model, a project of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School. Overall, the average family had to spend $3,500 more last year to buy the same amount of goods and services as they purchased in previous years.
“Do we get customers who are angry and irate because things have changed? Yes, we sure do,” Wayne Holly said. “Do we get customers who say ‘I never used to pay that before?’ I say ‘Yeah, I’ve never paid $4.50 for a gallon of gas.’” Those federal pandemic relief laws also provided stimulus checks to U.S. taxpayers, which helped boost consumer spending on goods subject to state and local sales taxes. From April 2021 to January 2022, total state tax revenues, adjusted for inflation, increased more than 19% compared to the same period a year earlier, according to a recent Urban Institute report.
The relief plans vary by state. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, released a plan for spending the state's budget surplus that included a proposal for income tax rebate checks of $1,000 per couple.In California, Democratic lawmakers have released separate proposals to send rebates of $200 to $400 to each taxpayer, while Gov. Gavin Newsom saidhe wants to distribute fuel debit cards of up to $800 to help ease the burden on residents paying the highest gas prices in the nation.
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