From the Executive Director

from NewsLink, Vol. 3, No. 4, Summer 1999

The Beacon Hill Institute and the Heritage Foundation have announced a strategic partnership to combine BHI's State Tax Analysis Modeling Program (STAMP) with the Heritage Foundation's federal and state tax analysis capabilities.

BHI will combine resources with Heritage to show how national economic conditions and state and federal policy changes affect state economies. The Heritage/BHI Model will provide:

•An invaluable tool for modeling the effects of both federal and state tax changes on jobs, wages, capital spending and tax revenues;

•Tax revenue analysis that accounts for the dynamic effects of policy changes;

•An independent review of state tax programs and proposals; and

•An innovative way to demonstrate the impact of tax changes on the citizens of individual states.

The Heritage Foundation's noted Center for Data Analysis will coordinate research efforts with BHI's STAMP team of economists. The Center for Data Analysis is a state-of-the-art research center designed to analyze the effects of public policy changes on individuals, families and businesses at the local, state and national levels.

William Beach, director of the Center for Data Analysis, said “Our strategic alliance with the Beacon Hill Institute will allow us to expand greatly the ability of both organizations to perform economic analysis of tax policy changes in the 50 states.”

The first project undertaken as part of the partnership was an updating of the Beacon Hill Institute's Ohio STAMP conducted during the summer. In performing the update, BHI found that Ohio could add $1.9 billion to payrolls, create 56,000 new jobs and take 25% of state taxpayers off the tax rolls by consolidating the existing tax schedule from nine to three brackets. BHI `s Ohio STAMP, first used in 1998, helped derail efforts to raise Ohio's state sales tax from 5% to 6%.

Heritage and BHI expect to model four additional states by the end of the year. Said BHI executive director David Tuerck, “Anyone who pays taxes should be happy to hear about this new partnership.”

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