By John Hilber / Broadcast version by Farah Siddiqi reporting for the Kent State NewsLab-Ohio News Connection Collaboration.

Republicans in the Ohio House of Representatives have introduced legislation that would phase out the state income tax and do away with the commercial activity tax, which is Ohio's main tax on businesses.

House Bill 386 and Senate Bill 327 were introduced in January. Both bills would continually decrease the income tax rate for Ohioans, aiming to eliminate it by 2030.

Bill co-sponsor Sen. Steve Huffman, R-Tipp City, said this is the second time he has introduced a bill to eliminate Ohio's income tax. The Senate bill is co-sponsored by George Lang (R-West Chester).

The House bill is co-sponsored by Reps. Adam Matthews, R-Lebanon, and Brain Lampton, R-Beavercreek.

"We need to have a leaner government, and the money is better spent by the taxpayers," Huffman said. "Also to be competitive with other states. If a business is going to locate in Ohio, they know their employees are going to get 3-4% less in pay to pay the income tax that they wouldn't have to pay in other states."

Opponents of the bill say the elimination of income tax would cause the state to lose funding for other services that are important to Ohio.

"If you were to eliminate the income tax, if nothing else was done, you would be cutting annual support to local governments, and the public libraries - each of them - by almost $200 million per year," said Zach Schiller, a research director at Policy Matters Ohio. "You would be reducing support for public safety, or everything that cities, villages and townships spend money on."

"This is a wildly irresponsible thing to do," Schiller added.

Eliminating the income and the commercial activity tax would cause a $13 billion deficit, according to the Ohio Capital Journal. The figure is about 15% of Ohio's 2024 fiscal year overall revenue.

"If there's no replacement of revenue with property tax and sales tax, the state will have to cut spending, and the biggest categories of spending for the state are education and Medicaid," said David Brasington, a professor in the department of economics at the University of Cincinnati. "If the revenue is replaced by sales and property tax hikes, that wouldn't necessarily be the case."

Huffman believes the state of Ohio would not see budget shortfalls during the process of phasing out income tax, in part because the state has a large rainy day fund.

"I also think that there would certainly be a better business environment," Huffman said. "To be able to bring businesses to Ohio because we have less of a tax structure, but also as retailers - people will have more money to circulate through the economy to buy goods and services."

But Schiller said Ohio has cut income taxes in the past, and it hasn't yielded the results that Huffman hopes for.

"We've reduced, especially, the rates that upper-income Ohioans pay, we've created a business income deduction for business owners, and where has this gotten us?" Schiller said. "Our median household income still trails the national average; our job growth has trailed the national average. Ohio's economy has not, in fact, met national averages despite almost 20 years of income tax cuts."

The current state income tax ranges from 2.75 to 3.75%, with households making less than $26,050 having a 0% tax rate.

The median Ohio household earns $66,990 per year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Under the current tax code, that household would pay up to $1,842.23 in Ohio income taxes.

Opponents of the bill fear that a further income tax cut would result in the wealthiest Ohioans paying less in taxes.

"Anytime you cut income taxes, it is going to disproportionately benefit the higher income people, because they're the only ones that pay an income tax," Brasington said.

In addition to the income tax being cut, the bill would also eliminate the commercial activity tax (CAT) for businesses in Ohio, which is a tax on what businesses sell. The CAT applies only to companies that have over $150,000 in sales. Only about 10% of Ohio businesses pay the CAT.

"Small businesses do not pay the tax," Schiller said. "If we eliminate it, we're basically saying the biggest companies in Ohio don't need to pay business tax."

Brasington pointed out that if Ohio were to eliminate the income tax, Ohio would be the only state in the region to be without it, which could make the state more attractive for businesses.

He also said that more wealthy individuals are sensitive to tax changes, meaning that if Ohio eliminates income tax, it could influence more wealthy people to move to Ohio - which could in turn aid in the creation or expansion of businesses.

"What people want is the level of services and types of services they like, but they want it done without waste at the lowest possible tax rate that you can get," Brasington said. "So if you just cut taxes, then it will favor certain people and certain businesses, and they will be drawn [to Ohio]. But certain people and businesses may be pushed away if those cuts and taxes are also accompanied by a decrease in services."

If the legislation passes, Ohio would become the tenth state in the U.S. to eliminate the state income tax.

"I think that it will make it that much less likely that we'll have a state with well educated, healthy residents with a full range of opportunities," Schiller said. "We'll have a much more unbalanced tax system that is both unable to meet the needs of Ohioans and shifts much of the cost to low- and middle-income people. It will be much harder for Ohioans to live the happy, productive lives that we all would like."

The House and Senate versions of the bill are currently before each chamber's Ways and Means Committee.


This collaboration is produced in association with Media in the Public Interest and funded in part by the George Gund Foundation.


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Professors on college campuses across the country are unionizing at increasingly higher rates and a bill in the Maryland General Assembly may help the efforts at state universities.

The legislation would give faculty at Morgan State University, St. Mary's College of Maryland, and faculty in the University of Maryland system the right to form a union. Another bill would also offer collective bargaining rights to graduate assistants at Maryland universities.

Del. Linda Foley, D-Montgomery, said the legislation would give teachers at each university the freedom to decide.

"If they desire and they vote for a union representative to represent them, then they can bargain a contract with their employer," Foley explained.

The bill includes full-time or part-time faculty, and those who are either on tenure or non-tenure tracks. Foley added faculty at Maryland community colleges are already able to organize unions.

Since 2012, the number of unionized faculty across the country has grown more than 7%, with more than a quarter of all faculty belonging to a union. More than 80% of unionized college faculty members are nontenured. Foley, a former vice president of the Communications Workers of America, said despite perceptions, unions are not just for blue collar workers.

"Just because they're not doing manual labor or you know working in a sweatshop so to speak, doesn't mean that workers don't have rights to collective bargaining or that collective bargaining isn't meaningful," Foley emphasized. "It certainly is, because there are many, many issues that collective bargaining can address."

She added workers could benefit from negotiating with an employer about hours, wages and working conditions which would otherwise be more difficult without a union.


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Consumer advocates in Virginia and around the country are trying to chart a new path forward as a federal consumer rights watchdog is being effectively "defanged."

In February, dozens of probationary employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were fired.

Between 2021 and 2025, the bureau gave $9.4 billion back to consumers but the Trump administration has pulled the agency off numerous consumer protection lawsuits, including against major bank Capital One for allegedly cheating millions of customers out of $2 billion in interest.

Jay Speer, consumer rights attorney and executive director of the Virginia Poverty Law Center, said consumers will feel the brunt of the decisions.

"People not going to get all this money back that they should be getting from these wrongdoers," Speer pointed out. "Basically, it's a message to big companies that they can do whatever they want. Nobody's going to stop them, so abuse of consumers is just going to get worse. There's no question about it."

Russell Vought, Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget, has posted on social media the bureau is "woke" and weaponized.

Advocates are putting up a fight. Speer pointed out his organization has joined a lawsuit to stop the bureau's closure. He argued administration efforts to disband the agency break the law and cut into Congress' power to create new federal agencies.

"Congress established this," Speer stressed. "It's not up to the executive branch to just do away with it by some executive order or whatever they claim they have the authority to do it. That's not right."

Conservatives called for the bureau's closure in Project 2025, which Vought helped author.

Union workers across Montana are celebrating the death of a bill which would have given employees the right to choose whether to join a union when hired by a represented company.

Known as the "right to work" bill, some said its title is misleading. More than 200 people signed up to speak against Senate Bill 376 at a hearing last Friday, and more joined them at a rally outside the Statehouse later in the day. Only two people testified in favor.

Jim Soumas, principal officer for Teamsters union Local 190, said it is "inappropriate" to expect unions to do their work with optional dues.

"It's like asking a business to provide a free service," Soumas pointed out. "There's cost to the union to provide professional representation and negotiation skills. We provide that for our members but that comes with a cost."

After the bill failed a committee vote Saturday, its sponsor, Sen. Mark Noland, R-Bigfork, tried to force it out of committee but 14 majority Republicans joined Democrats to block the move.

Jason Hottel, a member of Ironworkers Local 732, said early in his career, he worked in Idaho, a "right to work" state. He could not live off the wages, he said, so he moved back to Montana, a state with a strong union history.

"Since then, it's been night and day with what it's done for my life," Hottel explained. "The people around me and my children and everybody else involved with my life has been the biggest impact."

Hottel added he rallied at the Capitol to be an example for younger union workers. Montana is one of 23 states to have not passed so-called "right to work" legislation.