JACKSON, Miss. — Farish Street has an all-too-familiar story. 

Once a booming Black-owned entertainment and business district that drew Black customers from all over Mississippi, it struggled after segregation ended. Today, it suffers from the same blight and infrastructure issues as many other Jackson neighborhoods — and far too many once-segregated communities across the country.

I decided to visit Farish Street to get the perspective of small business owners on the state’s tax cut policies for an investigation published this week about a wave of such cuts pushed by conservative groups. Several told me that the state’s income and corporate tax cuts rarely benefit the Black business owners there. 

“The tax cuts are for big businesses and the rich,” said Eric Collins, owner of Herbal Blessings, a health food store and vegan cafe. “As for the support our small businesses get from the state? It’s very little.”

Marshall’s Music and Bookstore, owned by Maati Jone Primm, is located a few doors down. Primm’s grandmother, an activist who came to Jackson from nearby Utica, started the bookstore 85 years ago. 

“This used to be a hotspot,” Primm said. “The elders will tell you that on a Saturday, Black people used to come from all over Mississippi to come to Farish Street. You used to have to walk sideways.”

Primm connects the way the state Legislature handles taxes to a longstanding practice in the state to oppress Black Mississippians. Its tax structure – and the new reforms – benefit the state’s wealthiest, who are mostly white. And the majority-white state Legislature has long starved majority-Black Jackson of tax revenue.  

She sees taxes as one tool in a box filled with policies enacted by the mostly white Legislature, including voter restrictions, limited access to medical care and underfunded public schools, that make it difficult for Black residents to thrive. 

“I feel like they are attacking us,” Primm said. “It’s plantation politics. It’s absolutely awful. You have all these different attacks. It’s almost death by a thousand cuts.” 

Part of that punishment, she said, is starving Jackson of tax revenue.

It’s not a new allegation. The NAACP and nine Jackson residents filed a Civil Rights Act complaint with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last year alleging that state decisions about Jackson’s access to tax revenue have reduced or blocked funds needed to maintain the city’s water supply, ultimately resulting in long-running problems accessing clean water. City residents suffered through a days-long outage last summer.

“It’s the culture of Mississippi that says they must oppress Black people,” Primm said. “They don’t want to share power, and they really don’t want to share resources.” 

Mississippi enacted a substantial income tax cut in 2022 that moved the state to a single tax bracket, regardless of how much you make. These “flat” taxes sound equitable, in that everyone is paying the same percentage of their income in taxes. But the rest of a state’s taxes don’t work that way, sales taxes especially, and the main way governments can avoid leaning most heavily on lower-income people is with income-tax rates that increase as earnings do. 

Mississippi’s tax structure already took a larger share of income from its poor and middle-income residents than its richest, according to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. The newest change will worsen that inequity. According to the group’s analysis, the state’s highest-income residents would receive an estimated $31,400 in tax cuts on average each year, while the lowest would get average savings of $20.

The state will likely see a $419 million reduction in revenue every year on average from the income tax cut, according to the University Research Center, a division of Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning that studies state and local policies.

Primm is most concerned about what that could mean for Mississippi’s public education system, already underfunded and underperforming, especially in places with larger lower-income Black communities. 

Her great-grandmother, who was enslaved, created a school. A visit to Primm’s bookstore makes her passion for education clear. As I waited to speak with Primm, she was helping provide books for a local church group. She’s stocked her store with countless books on Black culture and history, from Maya Angelou poems to soul food cookbooks to nonfiction on medical discrimination and books detailing the history of how African slavery in the U.S. began. Primm has adorned its walls with pictures of freedom fighters; Black people who have been murdered throughout the country’s history, including Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin; and modern cultural icons, like Morgan Freeman and Oprah Winfrey.

Underfunding education is a form of disenfranchisement in itself, Primm said. 

“The largely white power brokers want to maintain the status quo and in order to do that, they need to disenfranchise us,” Primm said. “What they count on is the people to be silent for all of this and suffer in silence. I’m not going to do that.”

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The Center for Public Integrity has won the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Breaking Barriers Award, and Audience Engagement Editor Ashley Clarke has been named Nonprofit Newcomer of the Year.

At an awards ceremony in Philadelphia Wednesday, Clarke was honored for helping transform the mission, workplace culture and partnerships of one of the country’s oldest nonprofit news organizations.

“Unhoused and Undercounted,” a Public Integrity investigation by data journalist Amy DiPierro and senior reporter Corey Mitchell, in partnership with The Seattle Times, Street Sense Media and WAMU/DCist, was recognized with the Breaking Barriers Award. The series, for which Clarke coordinated audience engagement, showed that local school districts across the country were failing to identify and serve hundreds of thousands of homeless students.

The Breaking Barriers Award honors journalism that brings “new understanding to an issue or topic affecting people or communities that are historically underrepresented, disadvantaged or marginalized, resulting in impactful change.”

Two other Public Integrity investigations, “Unequal Burden” and “Who Counts?,” were finalists in the INN Nonprofit News Awards’ best explanatory reporting category.

Clarke, 25, joined Public Integrity in 2021 after working at NBC4 Washington as a production assistant and weekend assignment editor. She earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland, where she studied multiplatform journalism and Arabic.

She helped define and enforce a newsroom-wide principle of reporting “with and in service to” the people and communities closest to the problems and solutions Public Integrity tackles. And she helped build an innovative local journalism collaboration model that was featured in a keynote address at the 2023 Collaborative Journalism Summit in June. 

“Ashley joined Public Integrity as we were defining a new mission that focused all of our investigative journalism tradition on confronting inequality in the U.S., and she saw right away that it would require a different approach to our journalism and how we treat our colleagues, sources and partners,” said Public Integrity Editor in Chief Matt DeRienzo. “I think she immediately recognized the potential of the nonprofit journalism model to upend deeply unequal power structures around who has access to information and how people’s stories are told. But also that nonprofit news can reinforce and protect those systems if not bluntly challenged.” 

“I’m incredibly honored to be recognized in this way,” Clarke said. “A few short years ago, I could not have imagined that I would be sitting alongside such talented journalists let alone be celebrated for my work.” 

In addition to her role in engagement and partnership work in the newsroom, Clarke is a steward in the Public Integrity union and is co-chair of a staff-led Public Integrity Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee. Her reporting has prompted reform of a Washington, D.C., housing program and contributed to a project that exposed how state tax policies are placing a disproportionate burden on lower-income people. That work has been honored with multiple awards this year. And in February, Clarke was named to Editor & Publisher magazine’s 25 under 35 list of young leaders having an impact on the journalism industry.

Last week, Public Integrity won a national 2023 Edward R. Murrow Award for Overall Excellence for its portfolio of investigative reporting about inequality in the United States, as well as an Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Feature Reporting.

Public Integrity’s journalists have been recognized with numerous other honors in recent months, including the Paul Tobenkin Award, a Peabody Award nomination, a National Headliner Award, an Excellence in Financial Journalism award, a National Association of Black Journalists Salute to Excellence Award, the Sigma Award recognizing the world’s best data journalism, two finalist honors for the Shaufler Prize for reporting about underserved people, the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing’s “Best in Business” awards, the Gracie Awards honoring media produced by and for women, the D.C. chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Dateline Awards, and the Signal Awards recognizing the country’s best podcasts.

Founded in 1989, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Center for Public Integrity is one of the oldest nonprofit news organizations in the country and is dedicated to investigating systems and circumstances that contribute to inequality in the United States.

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ABERDEEN, Wash. — Under an overcast sky, Patty Flores led a group of colleagues to an empty lot in the mobile home park where she lived. A bare patch of grass traced the outline of a home set ablaze in an electrical fire.

She saw it as a symptom of a larger problem, one that connected to her rising rent, the potholes pockmarking the street and the paradox that taking another job to cover the extra rent would require child care that she couldn’t afford.

The tax system in her state has long been one of the most inequitable in the country, leaning most heavily on the people with the least money. That, in turn, means less revenue to spend on services that can help people live less tenuous lives.

“I want to trust that there will be change,” Flores said. “I want a better life for my kids.”

When legislators proposed a bill in 2021 to increase taxes on Washington’s wealthiest residents and put the money toward child care and education, Flores was elated. She showed up to testify in support.

The bill passed. This year, the money started flowing in — hundreds of millions more than legislators anticipated. 

While efforts to pass a federal wealth tax are at a standstill, a nascent movement at the state level to get high-income people to contribute more to public coffers is beginning to notch successes. 

Washington state’s tax, on capital gains, overcame a court challenge in March. Massachusetts voters amended their constitution in November to tax millionaires at a higher rate. And legislators in eight more states introduced bills this year aimed at reforming tax systems that take a smaller share of household income from people with the most money than from people with the least. Those changes would yield hundreds of billions of dollars in potential new revenue. 

But this push is a far cry from the decades-long conservative effort to reduce taxes, particularly ones that higher-income people pay. 

Most of the recent tax-the-wealthy proposals never made it out of committee. The Washington and Massachusetts measures took years of efforts organized by local groups facing well-funded opposition. 

The State Innovation Exchange and State Revenue Alliance, two national groups now helping to coordinate state wealth-tax efforts, are outspent by billionaire-funded organizations that argue for yet more cuts. 

“The reality is wealthy people across this country wield enormous political power in terms of lobbyists, think tanks and organizations created to entrench their financial advantage,” said Kyle Huelsman, senior director of legislative affairs at the State Innovation Exchange. 

“We are really in a generational fight, and an incredibly disproportionate fight in terms of resources.” 

Washington and Massachusetts offer lessons for states wanting to make their tax systems more equitable. A big one: Drumming up the support can take a long time — and a lot of money. 

A ‘pure tax justice argument’

In Massachusetts, a constitutional amendment to increase taxes on the wealthy took a decade of advocacy work. Supporters gathered signatures to put it on the 2018 ballot, only to see it booted off by a court ruling after business groups sued. The Legislature then put it on the 2022 ballot, bypassing restrictions that doomed the other attempt.

A key reason that states take a higher share of household income from their lower-income residents than their wealthiest is sales tax. An income tax with different brackets — rates that go up as your income does — is the main tool states have to counterbalance that impact.

Massachusetts didn’t design its income tax that way. It had a single rate across income levels since its enactment in 1916, because its constitution required it.

That’s what the proposed amendment that went before voters in 2022 aimed to change. It called for an additional 4% income tax for millionaires on top of the state’s 5% flat tax. The proposal specified that revenue would go toward schools, public transportation, roads and bridges, more than 650 of which need repair. 

Labor, community and faith groups joined forces to support the ballot measure. Business interests and conservatives lined up in opposition.

The latter organized the Coalition to Stop the Tax Hike Amendment and raised more than $14 million to defeat it, with funders that included billionaires Jim Davis, the chairman of New Balance, and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, through his containerboard company. The Boston-based Pioneer Institute, a member of the State Policy Network, which advocates for tax cuts around the nation, wrote a book in opposition — “Back to Taxachusetts?”

While the money flowing to national tax-cutting groups is substantial, supporters of the Massachusetts amendment outspent the opposition. They did it by raising more than $32 million as Fair Share Massachusetts, a large part from teachers’ unions and other worker-funded groups. 

The conservative State Policy Network and its affiliates know that unions can be a key counterweight to the struggle over taxes. The groups’ solution: Cut off their opponents’ funding at the source. 

In a 2016 fundraising letter reported on by The Guardian, the State Policy Network said that “freeing teachers and other government workers from coercive unionism” would mean “permanently depriving the Left from access to millions of dollars in dues.”

Two of the network’s partner organizations provided free legal representation in a lawsuit that produced the 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling weakening public unions’ ability to collect membership fees.    

But that didn’t stave off a big-money battle in Massachusetts. Once the ballot measure survived a trip to the state’s high court, the decision was up to voters. 

Both coalitions made their pitch as the November election loomed. 

The Stop the Tax Hike group argued that the measure would impose one of the largest tax increases in state history, that the revenue could be put toward spending beyond the intended purposes, and that the results would leave small business owners “reeling from an unprecedented new financial hit.”

The Fair Share group pointed to Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center data showing that the wealthiest residents paid an average of 6.8% of their income in state and local taxes, while everyone else paid an average of 8.9%. Changing that, the group said, “is how we build an economy that works for everyone.”

“It became a pure tax justice argument,” said Phineas Baxandall, policy director of the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center. “The richest need to pay their fair share.”

Voters approved the amendment, 52% to 48%.

The Pioneer Institute vowed to track the tax’s impact. State and national teachers’ unions “claimed that it would be a net benefit for the state. However, they ignore the negative impact on the overall economy while at the same time avoiding accountability when it comes to how those dollars are spent and whether or not we are doing a better job of educating our children,” Mary Connaughton, the group’s director of government transparency and chief operating officer, said in an email.

For Huelsman, Massachusetts demonstrated what’s possible. 

“They really put out the guiding light of an incredibly popular issue,” he said. 

The fight over taxes on the wealthy

Taxing wealthy people at higher rates than residents with less money isn’t a novel idea. That’s how the federal income tax is designed to work. But Congress has cut top tax rates in big ways over the past four decades, contributing to the growing gap between the rich and everyone else. 

And the U.S. doesn’t impose an annual tax on wealth, a person’s assets. A ProPublica investigation showed that loopholes in the system allow the country’s richest people to pay very low tax rates, when they owe anything at all.

Several other countries impose wealth taxes. In Norway, for instance, such taxes are levied up to 1.1%. Switzerland’s cantons — semi-sovereign states — have had them since the early 18th century, accounting for nearly 10% of canton and local tax revenues in 2018. Colombia and Spain both approved wealth taxes last year, the latter for 2023 and 2024 only. 

In the United States, though, proposals for a tax on the ultrarich, including from Democrats Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington have stalled in Congress. That’s despite polling showing that the majority of Americans support the concept.

And in the past two years, at least 19 states have lowered their income taxes in ways that primarily benefit their most well-off residents, pushed along by conservative groups that include the State Policy Network.

All of that is energizing legislators and activists in Democratic-led states to band together to try to increase taxes on the wealthy — in some cases with actual wealth-tax proposals.

On Jan. 19, elected officials in eight states — Connecticut, New York, California, Washington, Hawaii, Maryland, Illinois and Minnesota — introduced legislation or held rallies for bills filed afterward. In March, Nevada legislators proposed a study on wealth taxes. It was the first public effort of a movement organized by State Innovation Exchange and State Revenue Alliance to move the needle on tax parity.  

They set the stage last summer, convening activists, think tanks and lawmakers from 10 states to strategize. Formed in 2014, State Innovation Exchange provides lawmakers with research, training, strategy and policy guidance to advance progressive legislation.

“One of the things that we saw really clearly in those conversations” was that “fights around wealth taxes were very siloed in individual states,” State Innovation Exchange’s Huelsman said. “But at the same time, the problem is very much felt across every state in the country in terms of the ultrawealthy avoiding taxes.”

The cohort met virtually once a month through April to share best practices and lessons learned. They’re planning an in-person meeting in September and are looking to add people from additional states.

How long it might take to see results outside of Massachusetts’ “millionaire tax” and Washington state’s capital gains tax remains to be seen. None of the proposals introduced this year have become law, and the infrastructure built to produce more tax cuts, especially tax cuts aimed at high-income people, is better funded.

According to 2021 tax filings, the most recent available, the State Innovation Exchange had just over $9 million in revenue. The fledgling State Revenue Alliance said it had about $2 million. 

Meanwhile, that same year, revenue at the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the State Policy Network was about $35 million combined. That doesn’t count the network’s state affiliates, which also raise money to advocate for tax cuts. 

And Americans for Prosperity, an influential State Policy Network partner whose lobbying efforts include tax cuts, had revenue of nearly $114 million.

They’re only some of the groups in the fight. Among U.S. think tanks conducting tax policy research or advocacy, organizations on the right have two-and-a-half times the money of the ones on the left, according to a 2020 study published in the Nonprofit Policy Forum journal.

ALEC and Americans for Prosperity did not respond to requests for comment. The State Policy Network, while not answering questions about funding disparities, characterized its tax-cut efforts as sensible.

“States have received record amounts of revenue in every year since the coronavirus pandemic,” Michael Lucci, State Policy Network visiting economy policy fellow, said in a statement provided to the Center for Public Integrity. “Cutting taxes provides relief and allows revenues to grow a bit less quickly than they otherwise would. Even some states that are not cutting taxes have struggled to figure out what to do with all the excess revenue.”

Temporary infusions of federal pandemic aid is part of the reason. Opponents of the tax cuts argue that budget consequences will follow.

“The same people and organizations who patiently packed the courts with judges who would take away our rights are the same who are making it harder to raise revenue for what our communities need,” Kristen Crowell, executive director of the State Revenue Alliance, said in an email. “For them, it’s a business decision — spend millions to avoid paying billions in taxes. For us, tax justice is woven into the fight for democracy, racial and economic justice.” 

‘We’ve suffered for so many years’

In 2019, Flores from Aberdeen went door to door, listening to low-wage workers in Washington state’s timber country talk about the problems they saw and the solutions they wanted. 

Flores was volunteering for Firelands Workers Action, a group that organizes and advocates on behalf of working people in rural and small-town swaths of the state. 

The survey results from over 200 conversations revealed pressing worries about affordable housing, health insurance, mounting disasters like wildfires and “impossible choices.”

“When the fires were coming through, they just had one cop car coming around to tell us to evacuate,” a veteran told Firelands volunteers. “No help getting out, nothing.” A social worker said that she paid as much for child care as she did on her mortgage. Asked what they thought should be done to help fix the challenges their communities faced, 69% of respondents said they supported taxing the rich.

In Washington state, “we live and breathe the regressive tax system every day through the many different ways we’re seeing our communities facing decades of disinvestment,” said Firelands’ executive director, Stina Janssen.

The nonprofit’s workers and volunteers sought to change that. They wanted to see investment by the state — one of nine without an income tax — that would usher in more affordable housing and public child care.

But there’s a history of pushback in the state when people have tried to change the tax system. 

In the early 20th century, the state relied on revenue from property taxes to fund the government — largely through farmland. But by 1930, the farm population dropped by nearly a third, placing a disproportionate amount of the tax burden on farmers’ shoulders. Many were unable to pay. 

A fraternal group called the Washington State Grange, which fought for the improvement of farmers’ lives through political action, spent years trying to get an income tax enacted. A ballot measure the group spearheaded passed by more than 70% of the vote in 1932. 

The Washington State Supreme Court overturned it the next year, arguing that its graduated rates violated the state constitution’s requirement “that all taxes shall be uniform upon the same class of property.” The high court did the same to another attempt a few years later.

The justices left intact new sales, business and occupation taxes. Washington’s system has largely been the same ever since: It relies heavily on state and local sales taxes that average more than 9% — among the nation’s highest. That’s why it leans hardest on the poor.

Washington’s constitutional requirement that all taxes be “uniform” has a backstory rooted in inequity: Slaveholders in Southern states pushed for the policy as a lucrative loophole.

“The ’personal property’ at issue in the adoption of the first uniformity clauses was not commercial wealth, tangible or intangible,” Robin Einhorn of the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in a Journal of Economic History article. “It was slaves.”

Uniformity clauses spread from there. But Massachusetts and Washington are among the few states where courts have interpreted it to prohibit different tax rates. 

Tax policy has been “used as a weapon against overburdened communities, especially the Black community,” said Sen. Joe Nguyễn, a Democrat who represents a Seattle-area district. “So for me, our tax structure is rooted in racism, is rooted in economic division, but it’s also a way for us to heal some of that from the past as well.”

Efforts in the early 2000s again fell short, including a ballot measure for a tax on the wealthy that failed after two of the state’s wealthiest residents helped fund the opposition in 2010. 

A decade later, Firelands and other tax reform proponents set their sights on capital gains. This time, they aimed for a clear message and strong public support. 

The 2021 bill filed from that effort called for levying a 7% tax on profits exceeding $250,000 from the sale and exchange of assets such as stocks and bonds. Lawmakers earmarked the revenue for early childhood education. 

More than 100 groups, including labor unions, human service organizations and immigrant rights nonprofits, teamed up to push the legislation forward. As soon as the Legislature passed it, several Washington residents represented in part by a State Policy Network affiliate, the Freedom Foundation, filed a lawsuit challenging the policy. 

“Washington has long benefited from its status as one of the few states without an income tax, though attempts by the political Left to impose one have continued unabated for about 90 years,” the Freedom Foundation’s director of labor policy, Maxford Nelsen, wrote in a statement at the time.

The group didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Flores, recalling that lawsuit, switched from English to Spanish at the Firelands office as Janssen, Firelands’ executive director, provided translation.

“So even as the common people are making a small incremental advancement, we see that some wealthy people are strategizing to repeal and roll back even that win,” she said. “We’ve suffered for so many years.”

But this time, when the case reached Washington’s high court, its ruling allowed the tax to stand. 

As of May, the state had raised more than triple the expected amount, with nearly $850 million collected from 3,190 payments. The first $500 million of annual revenue will go toward child care and early learning programs. The remainder will fund school construction.

Those results inspired advocates in Hawaii, one of the states where wealth tax and capital gains tax legislation was proposed this year.

“We can point to that and say, ’Look at this huge success,’” said Will Caron with Hawaiʻi Appleseed Center for Law & Economic Justice.

The tip of the iceberg

In Flores’ blue mobile home, mold stretched along the walls and ceiling. She feared it caused the respiratory problems plaguing her then 4-year-old son, Mathias.

Flores wanted to move into a single-family home with proper insulation. That, she thought, would be the end of her constant worries about mold. But the three-bedroom homes in her area cost around $200,000. 

“How am I supposed to pay when the wages are so low?” asked Flores, who was working two part-time jobs, at Firelands and a grocery store. 

Her experience is a common one. An analysis by Washington state’s Tax Structure Work Group revealed that those earning between $17,000 and $30,000 per year pay 15% of their annual incomes in Washington state and local taxes — substantially reducing their take-home pay.

By contrast, the wealthiest 10% of Washingtonians — those making at least $208,000 — pay only 3.4% of their annual incomes in state and local taxes.

Wealth inequality is growing, and “taxes are an important tool at all levels of government for pushing back against that,” said Washington Budget and Policy Center Senior Fellow Andy Nicholas. “And yet, we have a tax code that not only doesn’t push back against that, but makes it worse.”

But recent changes that make the system slightly more equitable are starting to kick in. The Working Families Tax Credit — a state version of the federal earned income tax credit — went into effect this year and offers up to $1,200 for low-to-moderate income working households in Washington. As many as 400,000 Washingtonians may receive the credit. The deadline to apply for the 2022 tax year is Dec. 31, 2023. 

The capital gains tax will increase annual state and local taxes for the wealthiest earners by half a percentage point on average, while the Working Families Tax Credit will lower the same taxes by 1.1 percentage points for the lowest earners, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. 

Nguyễn, the Seattle-area legislator, co-sponsored a wealth tax bill in this year’s legislative session that would impose a 1% tax on individuals owning financial assets including stocks, bonds and mutual funds exceeding $250 million. Revenue would go toward education, affordable housing, disability services and a tax credit for low-to-moderate income people. 

The state’s Department of Revenue estimated that the tax would collect $3.1 billion per year beginning in 2026 from around 700 Washingtonians, some of whom are the wealthiest people in the world. 

“The main wealth-building tool of the middle class has always been our homes, and we already tax that,” state Sen. Noel Frame, a Democrat who represents Seattle, said during a March 9 Senate committee hearing. “But the main wealth-building tool of the billionaires and ultra-millionaires is financial property, and we don’t tax that at all.” 

The Seattle-based Economic Opportunity Institute worked with the Legislature to help draft the proposed tax on what’s known as “unrealized” capital gains. For the organization’s Carolyn Brotherton, wealth is an iceberg. Realized capital gains — what the state just began taxing — serve as the tip of the iceberg, while “unrealized capital gains are everything floating beneath the surface,” she said. 

The proposal has stalled in committee. 

A major claim leveled against these types of measures by the groups opposing them: People and companies will be driven out.

“A lot of businesses are leaving the state,” Lance Christensen, California Policy Center’s education policy and government affairs vice president, said in an interview with Public Integrity. The group is a State Policy Network affiliate that dismissed a California wealth-tax proposal as a “goofy” union effort. “Once they decide they can’t do business here, they’ll move to Texas, Florida, Tennessee.”

Over 30 multimillionaires and billionaires left Norway in 2022, according to local newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv, after the nation increased its existing wealth tax. 

But a growing body of U.S. research shows that while some rich people migrate out of state because of increased taxes, most stay. A recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report showed that lower-income households are more likely to move out of state than higher-income people across 41 states. 

“Wealthy people, like all of us, are embedded in our communities. [They] have businesses in the state, go to church, have family and communities in those specific places. Those connections root everybody, including wealthy folks,” said State Innovation Exchange’s Huelsman, who sees the “millionaire tax flight” argument as an empty threat designed to maintain an unfair tax code.

Case in point: Shortly after Massachusetts’ voters agreed to raise taxes on millionaires, the Lego Group toy company announced its plans to relocate its Americas office to the state. 

In search of the dream

Originally from Michoacan, Mexico, Flores moved to Aberdeen 17 years ago to pursue the American dream. To her, that meant access to affordable housing, health care and child care. With a more equitable tax system, Flores believed that could be possible. 

But the mother of two struggled to find affordable child care. She’s not alone. Flores’ sister quit her job at a local grocery store to avoid hiring a babysitter. Instead, she took up cleaning houses so she could bring her children with her.

For Flores, the gulf between the dream and reality was large. She walked through the mobile home park where she lived in July 2022, pointing out the signs of decay.

“I have hope,” she explained later that afternoon, over a lunch of pupusas in the Firelands office. “That’s why I’m still here.”

That summer, Flores and her family managed to buy a house — a place with no mold. A year later, her 5-year-old son Mathias is healthy and breathes easily. She now works full time as a Firelands organizer.

They are inching closer to a more comfortable life. But there’s still a long way to go. 

“When the American dream comes true is when we have equity,” Flores said.

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JACKSON, Miss. — Amia Edwards lives here because she wants to make a difference. But in this majority-Black city, long starved for funding by the state’s mostly white Legislature, that’s proved a steep challenge.

The city’s recent water crisis came after years of chronic underfunding of Jackson’s aging water infrastructure. The stench lingers in Edwards’ front yard after raw sewage flooded her home twice — neither the city nor the state agreeing to help. Abandoned homes blemish her south Jackson neighborhood as residents fled for better-funded communities. And at her nonprofit that prepares Jackson youth for performing-arts careers, she sees the results of cash-strapped schools when her kids struggle to read scripts and rap lyrics.

Then Mississippi further sliced into its revenue to fund such needs by cutting income taxes in a way that mostly benefits its wealthiest — largely white — residents.

It’s one of at least 19 legislatures that seized the opportunity to do so in the midst of budget surpluses fed by federal pandemic funding. The expected revenue hit, according to the states’ own estimates: more than $10 billion in fiscal years 2023 and 2024. That’s more than double the entire 2023 general-revenue budget for the state of West Virginia, one of the states making cuts. 

Residents of Jackson, such as Edwards, say the move to disproportionately lower what the wealthy pay in taxes will further undermine communities that suffer from disinvestment. They worry that more budget cuts will come for essential services, like public education and infrastructure maintenance. Lower-income residents, they warn, will be hurt most. 

“The wealthy tend to always look out for themselves,” Edwards said. 

Conservative groups funded by rich political donors pushed these tax cuts. It’s a well-oiled machine working to ensure that the highest earners in every state pay as little in taxes as possible.

A network that includes the American Legislative Exchange Council (known as ALEC), the State Policy Network, Americans for Prosperity and their member groups have advocated for tax-cut efforts in at least 21 states in the past two years while opposing efforts to raise taxes for the wealthy in at least eight others, according to a Center for Public Integrity investigation. Their funding sources include billionaire Charles Koch and a dark money fund used by wealthy conservatives.

The groups have it down to a science: ALEC disseminates model bills. The State Policy Network puts out research and commentary promising economic benefits. Americans for Prosperity handles on-the-ground lobbying. And in a few cases, groups in their network sue.

Mississippi House Speaker Philip Gunn, a Republican who sits on ALEC’s board, introduced that state’s income tax cuts in 2022 — something he had tried to pass before.

Mississippi’s tax structure already took a larger share of income from its poor and middle-income residents than its richest, according to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. That’s common nationwide, driven by states’ reliance on sales taxes that fall hardest on people with the least money. 

The main way to at least partially counterbalance that: income taxes with rates that increase as income does.

Gunn’s bill, which a State Policy Network member group campaigned for and ALEC lauded, would eliminate Mississippi’s graduated rates and replace them with a “flat” tax. It passed the Legislature in April 2022. Now everyone in the state pays the same income-tax rate.

And the gap between the share of income that people with the least and most money contribute to the government will worsen. According to an Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy analysis, the state’s highest-income group would receive an estimated $31,400 in tax cuts on average per year, while the lowest would get an average of $20. 

Gunn did not respond to requests for comment.

Washington state, meanwhile, has tried to ease the burden on its lower-income residents from a system that disproportionately taxes them, but the same network of conservative organizations tried to stop the effort.

Washington is one of only nine states without an income tax and heavily relies on its high sales tax to fund its government. After a decade of attempts to make the system more equitable, the Legislature in 2021 passed a tax on certain types of capital gains — the profit on sales or exchanges of assets, like stocks — over $250,000. 

The Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank that’s part of the State Policy Network, filed a lawsuit on behalf of Washington residents to overturn the tax before the governor had even signed the measure.  

“There is a general hostility to taxation, considering it theft, which is false,” said Lisa Graves, the executive director of True North Research, a progressive corporate watchdog group. “The second component is tactical. They want to limit the power of government — state and federal — and one way is to limit their revenue to fund things like public schools.” 

ALEC, Americans for Prosperity and the Freedom Foundation did not respond to requests for comment. In blog posts, legislative testimony and other public comments about their tax efforts, the groups say that states benefit when taxes drop.

State Policy Network spokeswoman Camille Walsh said in a statement provided to Public Integrity that the group’s policy priorities include “reducing state income taxes so that there is a lower tax burden on taxpayers, while balancing other important objectives like tax environments that incentivize investment in the United States.” 

The new cuts are the latest front in a quiet financial war over taxes as a tool to consolidate wealth and power — to the detriment of lower-income Americans and people of color. The same conservative groups organized a similar campaign roughly a decade ago. 

Kansas was a high-profile example. Its 2012 legislation was designed with help from a former Reagan administration adviser on ALEC’s board of scholars, economist Arthur Laffer. Proponents of the tax cut claimed it would increase economic activity and pay for itself. Instead, the state lost hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, slashed public spending, hurt its credit rating and eventually repealed the tax cuts. 

This year, Kansas’ Republican-led Legislature tried again, passing a flat tax like Mississippi’s that state fiscal estimates said would reduce revenue by $330 million annually. 

Americans for Prosperity and a Kansas-based State Policy Network organization were among those in favor. ALEC testified that the lesson to take from 2012 was to pair tax cuts with “appropriate spending reforms.” 

Multiple studies have found that income tax cuts, especially those that mostly benefit higher-income households, don’t have significant impacts on economic growth or unemployment, but they do increase wealth inequality.

Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed the bill.  She cited the budgetary disaster after the previous tax cuts. 

“I refuse to take us back to an era of chronically underfunded schools, four-day school weeks, crumbling roads and bridges, and crippling debt,” Kelly said in April. “That’s exactly what this bill would do.” 

Republican Kansas legislators have vowed to try again next year.

In Washington state, where the capital-gains tax survived its legal challenge, a lopsided tax structure is at the heart of inequities faced by lower-income people, said state Sen. Joe Nguyen, a Democrat who represents a Seattle-area district.

“We have so many billionaires here who have been able to build wealth and generate value because of the resources and the people in Washington state,” Nguyen said. Revenue from capital gains “is an investment in the community that helped build their businesses and that will generate economic opportunities in the future.”

‘Intolerable in any modern society’

States braced for tough economic times in 2020 when faced with the COVID-19 pandemic. But many found their coffers flush with cash in the following years. 

The surpluses were largely created by federal pandemic aid and other factors, including consumers purchasing more goods than services, helping states because the former is taxed more than the latter. 

Members of Congress thought states might use the fleeting budget boost of the stimulus aid to cut taxes, and the law is written to prevent that. But states sued. A federal appeals court ruled that the provision was unconstitutional.

This set the stage for the flurry of state income tax cuts passed in 2021, 2022 and 2023.

Reversing a tax cut is politically unpopular. So when state budgets contract, cuts to public services follow. Public education is often one of the largest cuts, as K-12 education makes up big chunks of state budgets.

Lower-income residents feel that most keenly because they don’t have the money to, for instance, seek out a private school if their children’s public schools are badly underfunded. Higher-income residents often won’t feel the same reduction in quality in their local schools — and they’re the ones getting most of the benefits from the tax cuts. 

The changes in tax policy will hit hardest in states where funding for public services already is low.

In Mississippi, households with incomes below $30,000 will receive only 7% of the savings from its tax cut despite making up more than half the state, according to an analysis by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. 

Households making more than $100,000 will get 55% of the savings, even though they’re just 12 percent of all households.  

Meanwhile, the state will likely see a $419 million reduction in revenue every year on average, according to a forecast for the next decade produced by the University Research Center, a division of Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning that studies state and local policies.

That revenue reduction is equal to salaries for 8,700 teachers at the state’s average rates. 

Or it’s equal to state funding for childcare for more than 70,000 children.

It also is equal to almost half of what state and local officials have estimated is needed to fix Jackson’s water system.

Six months after the Legislature approved the tax cut, the NAACP and nine Jackson residents filed a Civil Rights Act complaint with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency alleging that state decisions about water funding are discriminatory. 

“The State has repeatedly interfered with Jackson’s access to tax revenue and repeatedly reduced or blocked funds from flowing to Jackson for its water facilities,” the complaint alleged in the aftermath of a days-long shutdown of the city’s water supply. “The result is persistently unsafe and unreliable drinking water and massive gaps in the access to safe drinking water that are intolerable in any modern society.”

The EPA is investigating the complaint.

West Virginia, the second-poorest state after Mississippi, approved a more than 20% reduction in income taxes in March. The new law could phase out the individual income tax entirely over time if the state’s sales-tax revenue growth outpaces inflation.

But the state’s fiscal impact estimate projects a loss of nearly $700 million in revenue next year alone. 

That amount could pay the salaries of nearly 14,000 teachers at the state’s average rate.

The top 1% of earners in the state would receive an average tax cut of about $10,000 per year, according to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy and West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy. The bottom 20% of earners, the groups say, would receive an average of $21 per year — less than the cost of a tank of gas. 

In February, as the Legislature considered the plan, Republican Gov. Jim Justice held a roundtable forum with two State Policy Network partners, Americans for Tax Reform and The Heritage Foundation, to hail the march to zero income tax. 

“That would be a flashing billboard around the country to entrepreneurs, businesses and to workers that West Virginia is open for business,” Stephen Moore, a Heritage Foundation  distinguished fellow, said during the forum. “You have a big surplus, don’t flounder. This is a magical moment for the state.”

Asked for comment, Moore said in an email that people at the bottom of the income ladder benefit the most from pro-growth policies like cutting income taxes. He said he tells State Policy Network organizations across the country that eliminating the income tax is a proven path to prosperity. 

That argument lacks context, said Richard Auxier, a senior policy associate with the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

“If you’re in Mississippi and West Virginia and you think the only difference between your states and Florida and Texas is income tax, I really think you ought to be doing a whole lot more looking,” Auxier said. “The reason you have an income tax is to shift the burden onto higher-income households. The reason to get rid of an income tax is because it can shift the burden onto lower-income households.”

The disparate impact of these income tax cuts can also be seen across racial groups. Auxier found that Arizona and Ohio’s 2021 tax cuts, for example, mostly benefited white households, while Latino households in the former state and Black households in the latter saw little to no benefit.

In Arkansas, the nation’s third-poorest state, the Legislature has lowered the personal income tax rate repeatedly, most recently in 2022 and 2023. Legislators cut the corporate income tax rate, too.

Arkansas is home to Walmart’s headquarters. The Waltons, whose family founded Walmart and are among the richest in America, contributed $1.2 million to the State Policy Network in 2021 through their foundation. The money was earmarked for “an education policy and advocacy program.” (The Walton Family Foundation is among Public Integrity’s funders, providing a grant for improving national-local news collaborations.)

One State Policy Network affiliate in Arkansas touts the income tax cuts on a list of its accomplishments. Another affiliate advocates for the state to eliminate its income tax entirely.

For some advocates in these poor states, the loss in revenue is alarming.

“We have so many other issues to deal with,” said Kyra Roby, a policy analyst with One Voice Mississippi, an advocacy group. “The state is embroiled in a welfare scandal, a health crisis in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision that originated out of Mississippi. We have one of the highest maternal mortality rates. Our rural hospitals are closing. Education is still underfunded. The residents in Jackson are still fighting for clean drinking water. But tax cuts are being pushed by outside interest groups.”

State Rep. Ronnie Crudup Jr., a Democrat who represents south Jackson in the state’s Legislature, voted against the tax cuts. He said the surplus of funds used to justify the cuts could have been put toward urgent problems.

“I just don't understand, for the life of me, why we continue to try to cut taxes when there's so many needs across this state,” he said.

Kelly Allen, executive director of the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, shares the same concerns in her state. Tuition for state colleges doubled over the past decade as West Virginia’s funding dropped, according to an October analysis by her group.

“Instead of further future revenue growth going to schools or infrastructure or healthcare or programs that benefit families, it will automatically be diverted to income tax cuts, which mostly benefit the state's wealthiest,” Allen said. 

Advocates of tax cuts often argue that they will attract businesses or that the money is better spent by taxpayers directly. In Mississippi, both those arguments draw skepticism. 

“If you’re not funding basic services, there’s no new businesses moving to a state where your kids can’t get an education, you can’t move your products out on the state roads and bridges, you don’t know where the closest hospital is going to be,” said Sarah Stripp, managing director of Springboard to Opportunities, a Mississippi nonprofit that works with low-income families. 

Added Nancy Loome, executive director of The Parents’ Campaign, a public school advocacy group: “You can give me money back, but I can’t hire public school teachers or pave the roads by myself. There are so many things Mississippians want that are why we pay taxes.”

‘The No. 1 issue’

The 2010 midterm elections saw a wave of conservative wins across the country. Republican-controlled states — where the party held the governor’s seat and both houses of the legislature — jumped from nine to 21. 

The following year brought a slew of similar proposals across these states to weaken unions and collective bargaining power, scale back access to abortion and voting rights, expand the ability to buy and carry guns and lower taxes on wealthy people and businesses, as documented by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez of Columbia University in his book, “State Capture.”

Many of these bills were largely identical. They were introduced and passed with unusual speed. And it was thanks to the trifecta of ALEC, the State Policy Network and Americans for Prosperity. 

ALEC, which first launched in the 1970s, is a network of conservative state legislators, philanthropies, wealthy donors, advocacy groups and private-sector businesses that drafts and disseminates “model bill” proposals for state legislation.

The State Policy Network is made up of state-level conservative, pro-business think tanks that produce reports, media commentary and testimony, often on behalf of bills that ALEC drafts.

Americans for Prosperity, the newest of the three organizations, was created and directed by the Koch brothers’ political network. It conducts electoral work and policy lobbying at both the state and federal level.

Financial disclosures show that donors to these organizations, in addition to the Walton Family Foundation and Charles Koch Foundation, include the foundation for the Coors family of Coors beer fame; the Sarah Scaife Foundation, started with money from Pennsylvania’s wealthy Mellon family; the Roe Foundation, whose businessman founder was an adviser to President Ronald Reagan and started the State Policy Network; and the Thomas W. Smith Foundation, a major funder of the anti-critical race theory movement.

But many of the people underwriting these groups’ efforts are anonymous. They send their money through DonorsTrust, which shows up as the contributor instead.

That obscures who’s benefiting from the tax cuts that their donations — tax deductible in the case of the State Policy Network and ALEC — helped bring about.

In 2021 alone, DonorsTrust funneled around $48 million to the State Policy Network and its affiliates and partners, including ALEC and Americans for Prosperity, according to the organization’s latest financial disclosures. On its website, DonorsTrust describes its donors as “conservative- and libertarian-minded.”

“We help streamline our givers’ charitable wishes and don’t comment on the specific policy positions of the organizations our accountholders recommend grants to,” said Lawson Bader, president and CEO of DonorsTrust, said in an emailed statement. “That said, our givers are ideologically diverse and over the years have directed their giving to more than 1,100 unique charities, some of which approach the tax-policy debate from different perspectives.”

A 2019 investigation by the Center for Public Integrity and USA TODAY found that Mississippi’s Legislature introduced more ALEC model legislation than any other state in the country.

“I don’t understand the state thinking the way they think,” said Credell Calhoun, a Democratic supervisor of the county where Jackson is predominantly located, which he said struggles to get state funds to fix roads and bridges. “But I think it’s coming from the national Republicans, pushing, pushing down here to cut taxes.” 

Usually business groups are reliable supporters of such a move. But in a 2022 report detailing the concerns of local business leaders, the state’s chamber of commerce wrote that “the Mississippi tax environment was not high profile nor ever discussed significantly as a priority.”

ALEC's 2022 annual report credits ALEC legislators for helping to dump graduated income tax rates in five states. A State Policy Network member, the Goldwater Institute, describes itself as having helped write Arizona’s 2021 tax-cut law. In nearly every state with a recent income tax reduction that benefited the state’s wealthiest households, these groups or their affiliates were there, promoting these policies.

“This is the No. 1 issue that we’ve heard from Utahns all over the state, and the No. 1 concern is that they’re feeling the pinch in their pocketbooks with inflation at all time highs,” Heather Andrews, Utah state director for Americans for Prosperity, said at a hearing last year for a tax-cut bill.

The legislation passed. She urged Utah to cut even more.

And this year it did, with a law the state estimated would reduce revenue by $475 million next year ⁠— the equivalent of average salaries for nearly 8,000 Utah teachers.  

“Utah does more with less,” Andrews said in her testimony for this year’s bill, “and that’s what we do.”  

‘ALEC puppet state’

The atmosphere was somber as people who advocate for policies that benefit lower-income households gathered in a modest, chilly conference room at a Homewood Suites in Jackson in March.

Advocates, local politicians and service providers bustled in and out, grabbing lunch and talking about taxes while keeping an eye on other legislative proposals in the waning days of the session. 

Further tax cuts had been floated in Mississippi this year but didn’t make it through.

Even so, they know more will come.

A provision in the 2022 tax law requires the Legislature to revisit by 2026 a proposal to eliminate the income tax entirely. Everyone in the room worried about funding for education, housing, infrastructure and other public goods their communities rely on.

Roby, with One Voice Mississippi, laid out two potential policy solutions: raise taxes on the wealthy to bring in more revenue or enact tax credits aimed at lower-income households to make the state’s tax system less reliant on money from poor people.

Both seem unlikely in the state’s current political climate. For now, Roby said to the people around the conference table, her primary goal is to stave off more cuts.

Alicia Netterville, principal at Acclivity Group and former deputy director of ACLU Mississippi, listened and then turned the conversation to a basic right underpinning every other policy: “Your vote is your currency.” State decisions would look different, she said, if every Black person in Mississippi could vote and participate in state government equally to white people.

Overall voter turnout in the 2020 presidential election in Mississippi was about 60%, sixth worst in the country. Registering to vote here is more difficult than in almost any other state, Public Integrity found as part of a 2022 review of voting access. The state employs most of the tactics traditionally used to keep Black people from voting or thwart their influence in government, including felony disenfranchisement, racial gerrymandering and strict photo ID requirements at the polls.

“You have to pay to play in Mississippi, and that leaves out a lot of people,” Netterville said.

Among the groups pushing restrictions that suppress voting across the country: ALEC and the State Policy Network.

Such restrictions can help state officials enact or ignore policies without worrying as much about the breadth of support for the ideas.

A Mississippi Today/Siena College poll in January, for instance, found that cutting the state’s grocery tax, which most impacts lower-income households, is more popular than eliminating the state’s income tax. 

Mississippi’s grocery tax is the nation’s highest. Most states don’t have one.

“You know, I will argue all day that we're an ALEC puppet state,” Stripp, with Springboard to Opportunities, said at the March meeting. “I think the hardest part of this argument is that the Mississippi Legislature is not accountable to the people of Mississippi. How do we as people of Mississippi push them forward when it's hard to make them accountable to their actual citizens?”

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Two men investigated by the Center for Public Integrity for a story about groups that fundraise for causes like childhood leukemia but keep virtually all the money have been charged in connection with “schemes to defraud donors,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.

Richard Zeitlin, 53, and Robert Piaro, 73, were both arrested and charged Thursday with wire fraud in connection with telemarketing. 

Public Integrity reported in 2019 that Zeitlin, of Las Vegas, ran telemarketing businesses that helped fuel a trend of political action committees spending little on the causes they were supposedly benefiting. The pitches for donations came on behalf of groups that sounded like charities, playing on donors’ sympathies for ill children, struggling veterans and others in need.

“During the last four years,” reporters Sarah Kleiner and Chris Zubak-Skees wrote, “the U.S. saw a significant spike in the number of PACs that raise most of their money from small-dollar donors before plowing much of it back into salaries, administrative costs and raising more cash. … PACs that contract with Zeitlin account for about half of that spike.”

The indictment alleges that Zeitlin directed his employees to portray PACs as charities, then “made efforts to conceal” those actions.

Piaro, of Wisconsin, ran PACs such as Americans for the Cure of Breast Cancer. That group raised more than $2 million from 2018 through January 2020 but “made only a single charitable donation of approximately $10,000 to one breast cancer charity … and did not otherwise materially fulfill the representations made to donors,” the indictment alleges.

Both men “allegedly exploited these important causes and the good intentions of everyday citizens to steal millions of dollars in small donations,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.

Neither man’s attorney could immediately be reached for comment. But Lance Maningo, Zeitlin’s lawyer, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that his client had been cooperating with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for more than a year.

Public Integrity’s investigation into Zeitlin’s operation was cited in a class-action lawsuit filed against him in 2021. “Instead of putting the millions of dollars raised by the Zeitlin companies to work for these noble causes, the scam PACs and their complicit treasurers (who also profit from this massive scheme), funnel nearly all of the funds back to the Zeitlin companies through an array of bogus and inflated overhead expenditures,” the lawsuit stated. 

Zeitlin denied the allegations in the suit, which is pending.

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In the past year, the Supreme Court has made several decisions that have radically reshaped essential rights for Americans spanning from abortion access to gun rights to the separation of church and state. 

The higher court rulings have prompted an array of analyses of how some of these decisions will disproportionately impact some already marginalized groups – like how gutting affirmative action could sharply decrease Black and Latino student enrollment in colleges and overturning abortion rights will especially hurt Black women. A recent article published in the American University Law Review urges readers to also focus on how these decisions, and others pending before the Supreme Court, could affect another marginalized group: people with disabilities. 

The article, “The Disability Docket” — co-authored by University of Pennsylvania professors Jasmine Harris and Karen Tani as well as Shira Wakschlag, senior director of legal advocacy and general counsel of The Arc of the United States — applies a “disability lens” to the Supreme Court’s 2021 and 2022 terms to show how these decisions could have far-reaching implications for marginalized communities. 

And it goes deep into how decisions that aren’t specifically considered disability cases, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, may disproportionately impact people with disabilities. 

But it also delves into how some cases that focus more on disability rights — and are pending before the court — may have broader civil rights impact. One case is Acheson Hotels, LLC v. Laufer for which the court will review the “tester” standing to challenge a hotel’s failure to provide accessibility information on its website, even if the tester never intended to stay at the hotel. Testers act as investigators, where someone voluntarily will put themselves in a situation to experience discrimination for the purpose of a legal challenge. The outcome of that case can have broader impacts on the use of testers in other civil rights cases, like fair housing.

The authors also explore the historical context behind the legal decisions regarding the rights of people with disabilities and other marginalized groups. These decisions, they say, have always been intertwined. The authors also provide advice to litigators and advocates who may find themselves arguing disability cases before this Supreme Court.  

The Center for Public Integrity spoke with two of the papers’ authors, Harris and Tani, to learn more about their findings and why it is important to apply this “disability lens” to the country’s current legal landscape.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Q: Why was it important to undergo this study of how decisions made by this Supreme Court would impact people with disabilities in particular?

Harris: Disability is an often forgotten piece of the court’s docket and often neglected in terms of how it operates, and that’s reflective of how disability is in society as well. We have differential treatments for people with disabilities, and sometimes that’s warranted, and at other times it’s not. … At all corners of both society and law, you have this sense that disability is different and ought to be treated differently. 

Tani: Disability cases do really important work for the law. Their reach is broader than disability. But my sense is – and I think the sense of other people – is that those decisions tend to get kind of under-appreciated or not recognized at the time. And so the actual significance, the legal significance of those decisions has gone under appreciated.

I think part of the impetus for wanting to do this kind of Supreme Court roundup with the disability throughline was just to say, historically, there’s a pattern here of these cases actually being in some sense much more significant and far reaching, but because they’re labeled like a disability case, they’re not kind of as hot button. They’re not as sexy. They’re considered sort of in that silo. And so the idea, I think was to kind of like, carry that insight forward and see how cases more recent cases might fit that pattern.

Harris: Look, more than 61 million adults in the United States – that’s just adults – have one or more disabilities. And that’s before COVID. We haven’t had the post-COVID numbers with long haulers included in there. Disability is more pervasive than we think, and so if we see disability as touching many more things, places and people than it already does then applying a disability lens becomes even more important. 

Q:   What are some examples of “non-disability” cases heard by this Supreme Court that impact people with disabilities?

Tani: There are these big cases where they’re going to affect people with disabilities, and that effect has just not been part of the conversation. So I think our insights with both — Dobbs and West Virginia vs. the EPA — is to say, look this has a really particular and potentially severe impact on certain people with disabilities. And let’s kind of surface that as well. 

For the West Virginia vs. the EPA case, we drew on some great evidence, by other folks, about the way that people with disabilities are just disproportionately impacted by climate disasters and other disasters for various reasons, some of which have to do with underlying vulnerability and economic precarity. 

Harris: For people with disabilities, abortion has always been part of healthcare. It’s always been something that’s been talked about, not only from an individual body standpoint that [pregnancy will result in the body] taking on more stressors that create or exacerbate disabilities, but also in terms of reproductive options and choices more broadly. It’s also for people with disabilities who want to become parents, and the kind of struggle that has been around that, and that dates back to eugenics.

With respect to Dobbs, you have situations where it’s already really hard for people with disabilities to travel right independently. Now they have to cross state lines in order to get abortion care that makes it disproportionately difficult.

And so that kind of insight in terms of thinking about the ways in which these cases have compounded effects, when you think about intersectionality, it’s going to affect poor disabled Black and Brown women. That’s who’s going to be disproportionately affected and harmed the most. You have to look at Mississippi, where the rates of disability are incredibly high. The rates of poverty are high, and it’s Black and Brown people in those situations, and when you see all of that together it gives you a different picture of what the discrimination looks like and how it’s operating.

Q: Why is it important for everyone interested in civil rights to be paying attention to the outcome of some disability cases pending before the court?

Tani: Like it or not, the statutes are sort of tethered together. Your lawmakers have basically patterned one after the other, such that, you know, they’re kind of traveling together in the law. So you really do have to pay attention. 

Harris: There’s a sense in which the lack of publicity was a good thing at one point, because the disability rights movement started heavily based on white men. And it was really veterans who had connections with Congress. So there was a way in which that allowed the foundation of the law to push through very quickly in ways that the public didn’t get a chance to understand what this law was going to do and what disability discrimination looked like. 

When something goes wrong in the Supreme Court, the popular retort is, well, you’ve got Congress, so you can go to Congress, and you can vote and your vote matters. I think this is a particularly difficult issue for people with disabilities, because voting and voting rights and access to the vote has been so constrained over time and continues to be [constrained].

How will people with disabilities be able to actually have their voices heard and remedy the harm that comes out of this court?

Tani: I mean, one last thing that I’ll say is that there are disability civil rights cases with the potential to have vast implications for other civil rights laws. The Acheson case is about tester standing and testers are important, not just in the [Americans with Disabilities Act] context, but also the race and fair housing context. It’s an obvious example of where there could be spillover to other contexts. 

Q: What is some of the advice you have for attorneys and advocates bringing disability cases before this Supreme Court?

Tani: Strategy is really important before this court because they could make bad laws. We tried to call attention to some times when you’ll be asked a bad question for the court to decide and you just have to mobilize to change public opinion.

If this case is really going to be that bad, how can we get it off the docket anticipating what the court might do?

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Season 2 of the Center for Public Integrity’s podcast, “The Heist,” has won a 2023 Salute to Excellence Award from the National Association of Black Journalists.

“The Wealth Vortex,” which confronted America’s racial wealth gap through the story of an Iowa woman attempting to open the country’s first Black-owned bank in decades, was recognized by NABJ for best interactive feature.

In addition to a five-episode podcast, the project included long-form text reporting, photography, drone video, resources for readers and listeners, a limited-run newsletter to share behind-the-scenes details, and an interactive text-messaging service pointing to more about the story. 

The podcast, produced in partnership with Transmitter Media (now Pushkin), was nominated for a Peabody award earlier this year in addition to numerous other journalism and podcast industry honors.

Season 3 of The Heist — “Land of Broken Promises” — will be out in October. Land of Broken Promises will explore the federal government’s role in harming generations of Black farmers.

“I’m grateful to this newsroom for giving reporters time and support to dig deeply into entrenched problems that fuel inequality, and grateful to the people who share their experiences with us,” said Jamie Smith Hopkins, a Public Integrity editor and senior reporter who hosted season 2. “We’re honored to receive this recognition from the National Association of Black Journalists.” 

In addition to winning a 2023 NABJ Salute to Excellence Award for best interactive feature, Public Integrity was a finalist for best news story for an investigation by Ashley Clarke and Amy DiPierro into a Washington, D.C., housing program. The story was published in partnership with the Washington Informer newspaper.

In addition to its Peabody nomination, Season 2 of “The Heist” has also been recognized this year with an Excellence in Financial Journalism award for best audio reporting; an award from the Shaufler Prize; a Signal Award silver medal; a “Best in Business” award; and finalist honors from the Ambie Awards, Dateline Awards, WAN-IFRA North American Digital Media Awards, Online Journalism Awards and the INN Nonprofit News Awards.

Public Integrity’s investigative reporting about inequality in the United States was recently awarded a national 2023 Edward R. Murrow Award for Overall Excellence. Other Public Integrity work this year has been honored with the Paul Tobenkin Award, a National Headliner Award, Mental Health America’s 2023 Media Award, Dateline Awards, the Gracie Awards and the shortlist for the Sigma Award recognizing the world’s best data journalism. 

Founded in 1989, the Center for Public Integrity is one of the oldest nonprofit news organizations in the country and is dedicated to investigating systems and circumstances that contribute to inequality in the United States.

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The Center for Public Integrity has won a 2023 national Edward R. Murrow Award for Overall Excellence.

It recognizes a body of work by the nonprofit investigative newsroom that confronts widening inequality in the U.S. through reporting that’s rooted in innovative data analysis, powerful storytelling, historical context and collaboration with local journalists and sources closest to the problems and solutions in question.

Presented by the Radio Television Digital News Association, the Edward R. Murrow Awards recognize outstanding achievements in broadcast and digital journalism. 

Public Integrity was also recognized with a 2023 Edward R. Murrow Award for Feature Reporting for senior reporter Yvette Cabrera’s examination of a Navajo man’s quest to heal his land, his people and himself from sickness caused by uranium mining, part of the federal government’s quest to build a nuclear arsenal.

“An overall excellence award is such wonderful recognition of the clarity and commitment Public Integrity colleagues have about the organization’s mission of confronting inequality through investigative reporting, and to the work of hundreds of local journalists who have collaborated and partnered with us in this work,” said Public Integrity Editor in Chief Matt DeRienzo. “Every single person at our small-but-mighty nonprofit, both newsroom and business-side staff, had a hand in making this work happen and the impact on people’s lives that has resulted.”

The portfolio of work recognized for Overall Excellence included:

• “Unhoused and Undercounted,” an investigation in partnership with The Seattle Times, Street Sense Media and WAMU/DCist that exposed school districts’ failure to identify and serve homeless students across the country. It was followed by calls in Congress for accountability by federal agencies and an increase in federal funding for local schools to address the problem.
• “The Wealth Vortex” and Season 2 of “The Heist” podcast, which showed how government policies from Reconstruction to the present day have compounded to give the country a wider Black and white wealth gap than existed when civil rights laws were passed in the 1960s. 
• “Unequal Burden,” an investigative series in partnership with ICT showing how state tax policy and federal tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans have helped maintain and expand the wealth gap.
• “Who Counts?,” which found that 26 states made access to voting and political representation less equal in the past two years as the “Big Lie” about the 2020 election and a new super-majority on the U.S. Supreme Court opened the door to attacks on democracy unprecedented in modern times. 
• “Harm’s Way,” in partnership with Columbia Journalism Investigations and Type Investigations, which revealed the federal government’s failure to help communities forced to relocate due to the impacts of climate change.
• “Attacked Behind the Wheel,” in partnership with Newsy, which exposed the reality just below the surface of a Biden administration push for more women to become truck drivers as supply chain issues gripped the country: a pattern of sexual assault and labor abuses faced by women who have joined truck driver apprentice programs.
• And “Institution of One,” which investigated the lack of safe appropriate housing for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Public Integrity’s journalists have been recognized with numerous honors in recent months, including the Paul Tobenkin Award, a Peabody Award nomination, a National Headliner Award, an Excellence in Financial Journalism award, the Sigma Award recognizing the world’s best data journalism, two finalist honors for the Shaufler Prize for reporting about underserved people, the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing’s “Best in Business” awards, the Gracie Awards honoring media produced by and for women, the D.C. chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Dateline Awards, and the Signal Awards recognizing the country’s best podcasts. 

Founded in 1989, the Center for Public Integrity is one of the oldest nonprofit news organizations in the country and is dedicated to investigating systems and circumstances that contribute to inequality in the United States.

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One of Leah Mapstead’s favorite things about living independently is decorating her own space. 

Her condo offers a unique and adventurous theme in each room, from an African safari living room to an ocean bathroom. But Mapstead’s sense of home goes beyond the physical space of her Phoenix condo, located in a gated community for adults with disabilities.  

“Home is not just a place,” Mapstead said. “It’s loved ones, memories, somewhere to feel safe and somewhere you know you can be yourself, no matter what.”

At a Center for Public Integrity event on July 26 — the 33rd anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act — Mapstead was one of four storytellers with disabilities who shared what “home” means to them. The stories were followed by a live virtual panel exploring the challenges of finding safe homes for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

“What is Home?” was co-sponsored with USC Annenberg’s Center for Health Journalism and State of Mind, a partnership between Slate and Arizona State University.

Watch a video of the full event on YouTube.

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Amy Silverman moderated the event. Her award-winning reporting last year for Public Integrity highlighted the challenges of finding appropriate homes for people with complex disabilities. Silverman is also the founder of Wordslaw, a platform for storytellers with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Mapstead is one such storyteller. Her work was featured at the event alongside pieces from fellow Phoenix-area residents Paul Costantini, Hailey Simon and Sophie Stern. Each shared insight into the people, places and things that make up their senses of home.

Costantini described the “paradise” he has lived in since January 2021 — a guest house on his parents’ property. He’s filled it with his own things, creating a space where he can feel secure, comfortable and independent. 

“I feel very grown up living here,” Costantini said. 

Simon shared a poem about the various homes she’s had, both within fictional worlds and throughout her life. Stern, who is Silverman’s daughter, discussed how one’s definition of home can evolve alongside family milestones, like when her older sister moved away to college.

Addressing the storytellers, Silverman said, “What I love is that each of you took the same theme — home — and you had such different interpretations of it.”

During the panel discussion, Silverman was joined by Becca Monteleone, an assistant professor of disability studies at the University of Toledo; Patricia M. Jones, a person with a developmental disability who has been a member of the Independent Living movement since the early 1990s; and Zoe Gross, director of advocacy at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network.

The disability community faces a lack of accessible and affordable housing, Gross said. Few homes have proper accessibility features — under 1% are wheelchair accessible. There is also no real estate market in the U.S. where a person can afford “safe [and] decent” housing solely with Supplemental Security Income, a government payment program for people with qualifying disabilities and limited income, Gross said.

“Rental assistance isn’t keeping up with demand, so funding affordable housing programs is really important,” Gross said. “Especially programs that help people with disabilities who are leaving institutions or at risk of entering institutions.”

But people cannot rely on policies alone to create equitable housing opportunities, Monteleone said. She believes community members without disabilities are also responsible for making spaces more welcoming and accessible for people with disabilities. This includes trying to anticipate needs like interpreter services or dietary restrictions.

“Rather than forcing people to both explain exactly what sort of accommodations they need and exactly how to achieve them … having some of that work done in advance is one step toward more inclusive spaces,” Monteleone said.

Support systems for the disability community need to start thinking outside the box, Jones said. Current models are too simplistic and don’t take into consideration the unique situations of each person with a disability, Jones said. 

“They plan for people who need a lot of support or no support, but they don’t think about what the nuances are of the needs in between,” Jones said.

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Leah Mapstead lives by herself. She likes decorating her home in different ways.

Her living room looks like an African safari. Her bathroom has an ocean theme.

But home is more than just her space. 

Leah said: “Home is not just a place.” 

Leah also said: “It’s loved ones, memories, somewhere to feel safe and somewhere you know you can be yourself, no matter what.”

The Center for Public Integrity is a newsroom that does stories about inequality. It hosted a virtual event on July 26. 

July 26 was the 33rd anniversary of The Americans with Disabilities Act. 

Leah Mapstead shared her story. Three other storytellers with intellectual and developmental disabilities shared their stories too. 

The other storytellers were: 

• Paul Costantini 
• Hailey Simon
• Sophie Stern 

Amy led the event because she wrote a story for Public Integrity last year. The story was about how hard it is to find safe homes for people with disabilities.

Amy also started Wordslaw for disabled storytellers.

Paul was one of the storytellers. He said he lives in a guest house on his parents’ property. He said it is a “paradise.” He has his own things. He feels safe, comfortable and independent. 

Paul said: “I feel very grown up living here.” 

Hailey uses American Sign Language. She shared a poem about homes she has had or she knows from fiction. 

Sophie read a story about how she thinks of home. Her view changed when her older sister moved away to college. She shared what that felt like.

Amy told the storytellers: “What I love is that each of you took the same theme — home — and you had such different interpretations of it.”

After the stories, the discussion began. Amy led the discussion with:

• Becca Monteleone, who teaches at the University of Toledo
• Patricia M. Jones, a person with a developmental disability who is a self advocate 
• Zoe Gross, director of advocacy at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network

Zoe said: People with disabilities can’t find accessible housing that they can afford to pay for. Most homes are not wheelchair accessible.

Zoe said: “Rental assistance isn’t keeping up with demand, so funding affordable housing programs is really important.” 

Zoe also said: It is important to fund “programs that help people with disabilities who are leaving institutions or at risk of entering institutions.”

Becca said that we all are responsible for making spaces more welcoming to people with disabilities.

Becca said: “Having some of that work done in advance is one step toward more inclusive spaces.”

Patricia said: Support systems need to start thinking outside the box. They need to think about individual needs.

Patricia said: “They plan for people who need a lot of support or no support, but they don’t think about what the nuances are of the needs in between.” 

“What is Home?” was co-sponsored by: 

• USC Annenberg’s Center for Health Journalism  
• State of Mind, a partnership between Slate and Arizona State University.

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