Colorado legislators want money meant for Main Street for themselves
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Tony Gagliardi, Colorado State Director, [email protected],
or Tony Malandra, Senior Media Manager, [email protected]
DENVER, June 8, 2020—Make no mistake, Be under no illusion. The strangely titled Fair Tax Act, which is expected to be introduced today in the Colorado Legislature, is a tax increase on small business—plain and simple. That was the reaction today from Tony Gagliardi, Colorado state director for NFIB.
“I’ll give proponents a small amount of credit for not springing this on us,” he said. “My association and three others were told on a conference call late last Friday by State Rep. Matt Gray that this was coming down the pike in the short time the legislature had left in its session. We also didn’t disabuse him of the pushback he knows is coming.”
At the heart of the federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, passed in 2017, is the 199A small-business tax deduction of 20% of business income. Because state taxes are tied to the final taxable income on an individual’s federal forms, many Colorado small-business owners also had less state taxes to pay. Gray and colleagues, Rep. Emily Sirota, Sen. Julie Gonzales and Sen. Dominick Moreno, want to de-couple state tax calculations from the federal government’s. In short, they want the 20% savings back.
“That 20 percent small-business tax deduction helped produce record highs in hiring, employee compensation, and business expansion,” said Gagliardi, citing 46 years of small-business data from NFIB’s Small Business Economic Trends reports. “And, it would still be doing so had not the coronavirus pandemic hit. We’re asking small-business owners to re-open and re-hire while we’re threatening them with a tax increase, providing them no liability protection from COVID-19 lawsuits, almost ruining their economy-calming, joint-employer rule, and still asking them to conform to the taxing regulations of more than 700 entities.”
Keep up with the latest Colorado small-business news at www.nfib.com/colorado or by following NFIB on Twitter @NFIB_CO or on Facebook @NFIB.CO
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NFIB is the voice of small business, advocating on behalf of America’s small and independent business owners, both in Washington, D.C., and in all 50 state capitals. NFIB is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, and member-driven association. Since our founding in 1943, NFIB has been exclusively dedicated to small and independent businesses and remains so today. For more information, please visit www.nfib.com/Colorado.
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