By an overwhelming margin, most states tax their middle- and low-income families far more heavily than the wealthy, according to a new study by the Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy.

• Nationwide, middle-income families pay almost 10 percent of their earnings in state and local taxes and poor families pay more than 11 percent. But the richest people effectively pay only 5.2 percent of their income in state and local tax.

• Since 1989, state and local taxes have risen on low- and middle-income taxpayers, but have fallen on the very wealth.

At a time when cuts in federal aid and declining state tax revenues are forcing state lawmakers to seek increased revenues, it’s important to evaluate who currently pays state and local taxes, said Robert S. McIntyre, ITEP’s tax policy director and lead author of the study, Who Pays? A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems in All 50 States. Unfortunately, most states require their poor and middle-income taxpayers to pay the most taxes as a share of income and the ways in which states have managed their budgets during the last decade have made this problem worse. Click Here.

Thanks to a recent tax simplification law designed to clarify who can claim a child as a dependent, some upper-income families with both younger children and older “boomerang” kids living at home could benefit from an unintended loophole. Click Here.

The anticipation can be worse than the reality. Here’s how to beat the odds when the IRS targets you. Click Here.

Without permanent tax relief, millions of Americans will see their taxes go up by billions of dollars in 2011. Click Here.

One good thing about the tax cuts in the new law is that most people didn’t have to wait long to start seeing the savings. Employers have generally lowered the amount of federal tax withheld from their workers paychecks, reflecting lower tax rates for most people and a larger standard deduction for married couples. The Treasury mailed checks to most people who claimed the Child Tax Credit last year, as an advance payment of the credit’s increase. And these mailings will continue until the end of the year to eligible taxpayers who filed after April. If you claimed this credit on your 2002 tax return, you may be eligible for up to $400 for each qualifying child. That’s the difference between the old maximum credit of $600 and the new amount of $1,000. Click Here.