Wisconsin state tax receipts are expected to be $1.6 billion lower over the next two years, bringing the current budget deficit up to $6.6 billion.
Here’s a list of the percentage reduction in tax collections over the previous year for the three largest categories:
Income tax: -8.3 percent
Sales tax: -3.3 percent
Corporate tax: -28.0 percent
The income tax reduction hurts the most, since the income tax is the largest single tax collected. The 8.3 percent one year reduction accounts for 86 percent of the $1.6 billion additional shortfall.
But I would call your attention specifically to the corporate and franchise tax, which is down a whopping 28 percent from last year. This represents a $282 million reduction from previous estimates.
It’s not too difficult to figure out why business taxes are down. If you’ve picked up a newspaper in the last year, you know that business receipts are plummeting, leading to an unemployment rate of 9.4 percent in Wisconsin.
But secretly, liberal groups are cheering, as plummeting business tax receipts strengthens their most common – and also most inaccurate – talking point: that somehow businesses aren’t paying their “fair share” of the tax burden. Liberal groups advocate for higher business taxes on the premise that businesses are paying less in taxes and individual taxpayers are paying more, as a percentage of the total tax burden. With businesses taking on large losses, and therefore paying less in income tax, it skews the ratio even more in favor of these groups, who like to argue that businesses are “dodging” their tax burden.
This was an incredibly weak argument to begin with. The business/individual tax ratio could be skewed for any number of reasons. If the economy was doing well individual income could grow at a more rapid rate than business receipts. As a result, it would appear that individuals were paying more as a percentage of taxes, even though it meant that incomes around the state were actually doing very well. Conversely, business taxes could drop, as they are now, if businesses leave the state or close down. This doesn’t mean businesses are paying less of their income in taxes, just that there are fewer of them and that they have diminished receipts on which to pay taxes.
Earlier this year, liberal groups had their way and sucessfully lobbied for a massive new tax (called combined reporting) on the same businesses that we now know are swimming in red ink. Shockingly, the $282 business tax shortfall expected by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau actually includes the combined reporting tax receipts.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this punitive new business tax may have actually cost us as much revenue as it created. New business taxes force higher unemployment, which gives us fewer taxpayers. Higher business taxes also lead to more expensive goods, which could harm state sales tax receipts.
Furthermore, higher corporate and franchise taxes also force businesses to either move to another state (or country) or scale back their operations, thereby diminishing revenues on which they pay taxes.
But this is a dream scenario for lefty groups, which sets a spiral of taxation into effect. They raise taxes on businesses, which causes business tax receipts to drop. Then, they argue that businesses aren’t paying their fair share, and lobby for even more business taxes.
