Cut State Business Taxes to Create More Jobs - Comments
posted by Harold D. Miller at 9:34 AM
Sunday, June 03, 2007
About Me
- Name: Harold D. Miller
I am President of Future Strategies, LLC, a consulting firm specializing in analysis, strategy, and communication. I am also Adjunct Professor of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz School of Public Policy and Management, I also serve as President and CEO of the national Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform (www.chqpr.org).
3 Comments:
Harold,
This change is so simple and reasonable I can't fathom why it wasn't pushed years ago - especially when we had Republican governors and Republican control of the house and senate. Why are the Republicans closet Democrats around here?
But with a big spending Democrat in control now, this option appears moot for the foreseeable future. What's a viable Plan B that Fast Eddy can live with? I don't believe we can wait until 2010 to start addressing this. We'll all be gone by then.
Harold,
Thank you for so clearly explaining the situation. However, I think that the only thing that will work is some type of organized response to this problem, similar to the response abut the pay raise fiasco.
Would you be willing to take the lead to organize the region's economic development organizations like the Pittsburgh Tech Council, Allegheny Conference, and others to put some weight on this issue?
Two years ago, when I was at the Allegheny Conference, I organized a coalition called CompetePA so that multiple organizations could speak with one voice about the issue. Unfortunately, most of the major businesses in the state calculated that they would get a bigger tax reduction from changing the Net Operating Loss carryforward cap or the apportionment factor weighting than from cutting the CNI. So even though everybody agreed the CNI cut was desirable, it was everyone's second (or third) priority. Despite the fact that the state had a record surplus last year, there was no reduction in the CNI tax rate.
The CompetePA coalition still exists, but it has become moribund. You can see that the website www.competepa.com hasn't been updated in a year, and it has failed to mount any significant effort to educate the public about how business taxes are impeding job creation.
The best way to make an impact on this issue at this point is for individuals (like you) to contact your legislators and tell them that this is important to you, and to get your friends to do the same. The anti-pay raise coalition was a grass roots effort, and that's what this needs, too.
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