Thats an interesting method.
There was a peculiar advantage to it, too.
As long as Nebraska's income tax rate was a percentage of the federal tax rate, the IRS enforced compliance on our behalf, without Nebraska putting out a penny.
But then when Nebraska veered away from that, the IRS said, "enforce your own compliance," which mean that the taxpayers of Nebraska, formerly getting a free ride on the IRS's back, had to pay for hiring state tax enforcers.
This all happened because originally, when sales and income taxes were imposed in 1967, replacing personal property taxes as the mainstay of Nebraska revenue, groceries were sales-taxable.
It took a couple of decades to deal with that mess.
The liberals in the Nebraska legislature, greedy to gouge the taxpayers, resisted any attempt to remove the sales tax from groceries. When they finally understood that in the long-term it was a losing battle, they voted for a special income tax deduction for groceries, circa $20-40 to be subtracted from the state income taxes (or added to the state income tax refund), to make up for what consumers had to pay on groceries.
Nebraska's longest-serving state senator, a self-serving liberal and crackpot, Ernie Chambers of Omaha, did actually do one thing right in all those years of his in the state legislature. He persistently argued, why mess with an income tax deduction; why not just simply not tax groceries?
Ultimately he won, but by that time other special interests had messed with the state income tax, twisting it way out of shape from the way it had originally been, a straight percentage (which varied from year to year, but was usually circa 20%) of one's federal income taxes.
And so.....Nebraska had to set up its own tax tables, divorcing it from the federal income tax.
The newest alteration of the Nebraska income tax, for this year, is a straight $25 deduction (off one's state income taxes), for property owners, for every deer that is killed on one's property. (Not for the hunters, but for the landowners.)
