Rhode Island’s 5.99% top rate and the revenue it produces fund schools, roads and health care, and lawmakers will decide again in 2027 whether to phase that rate down. Who benefits from a top-rate cut, and who pays for it later, is the question in front of them.
Seventy-one times since 2020, a state legislature somewhere in the country has voted to lower its top personal-income-tax rate — more reductions in six years than in the whole tax-cutting decade of the 1980s, and, according to an analysis published August 26 by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, done in increments small enough that most of them barely registered as news.
That is the argument at the center of ITEP’s analysis, written by Sarah Austin: the story of the 2020s is not one dramatic overhaul but a drumbeat of modest-looking rate reductions, multi-year phase-ins and automatic triggers that compound into something far larger than any single bill advertises. Sixteen states have cut their top rate at least three times since 2020 — roughly twice the number in any earlier decade, ITEP says. Among states that cut, the median cumulative reduction is 1.3 percentage points, against 0.5 percentage points across the entirety of the 2010s. The median state top rate has fallen from 5.3% in 2020 to 4.6% in 2026, and ITEP calculates that half of the decline in that median since 1990 has occurred in this decade alone…