Gazette Daily News Briefing, January 1
Welcome to the New Year.
This is Stephen Schmidt from the Gazette Digital News Desk, and I’m here with your update for January 1, 2024.
According to the National Weather Service, your New Year’s Day weather in the Cedar Rapids area will be cloudy with a high near 33 degrees.
We will have articles previewing the Iowa Legislative session in today’s paper and beyond. Here are a few issues I pulled from our coverage.
Most Iowa workers are taking home more money from their paychecks as the state collects less income tax — the result of recent tax cuts enacted by the Republican-majority statehouse.
Those Republican lawmakers, along with advocates for limited taxes, want to continue cutting and reduce Iowans’ taxes even more.
The impact of those tax reductions, though, is beginning to show in the state’s revenues. There essentially will be no revenue growth from the current state budget year to the next: overall state tax revenue is projected to be just shy of $11.5 billion in both the 2024 and 2025 fiscal years, according to the latest estimates from the state’s three-member Revenue Estimating Conference, the panel that projects future state revenues.
Before the recently enacted reductions, the state income tax produced nearly half of the state’s tax revenue that it spends on such things as education, health care, public safety, infrastructure and the environment.
When legislators return Jan. 8 to the Iowa Capitol for the 2024 session of the Iowa Legislature, Republican lawmakers plan to accelerate the state income tax reductions already on the books, with a possible eye toward gradually eliminating the tax altogether.
“Financially here in Iowa, we’re in the strongest position we’ve ever been in. And so that makes possible a conversation about expediting those cuts, bringing them up sooner — quicker — and getting those in place for Iowans,” Jack Whitver, the Republican Senate majority leader from Grimes, told the Gazette.
Iowa’s Republican leaders say they are not planning to expand on the list of laws passed last year addressing conservative social issues and regulating gender and sexuality issues in schools, but lawmakers say they may revive a push for religious liberty protections
State Sen. Dennis Guth, a Republican from Klemme, told the Gazette that Republicans are going to pursue a bill to strengthen religious liberty protections mirroring the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
The law, signed in 1993 by Democratic President Bill Clinton, requires that courts apply strict scrutiny, the highest level of judicial review, when considering cases where a person’s religious liberty is burdened. It was passed as a reaction to a 1990 U.S. Supreme Court case that was seen as narrowing religious freedoms.
The federal law applies only to the federal government, but at least two dozen other states have passed a version at the state level.
Iowa Republicans have considered the bill several times in the past, but it has faced steep opposition from business groups that worried it would discourage people from living and working in the state.
Sen. Guth said that the hope is that the business community will be less opposed to the legislation this time around now that similar bills have spread to more states nationwide.
