This week’s guest opinion by Priya Pal – Lawmakers Shouldn’t Undermine Missouri Voter-Approved Paid Sick Leave takes on one of the top issues at this year’s AFL-CIO Legislative Conference. To add a little context to the GOP effort to ignore the voters of Missouri consider the advice from the Missouri Chamber of Commerce, one of the groups pushing to ignore voters wishes on this issue.
From the website of the US Chamber of Commerce article Tax Deductions for Small Businesses is this nugget…
Employee salaries
All of your employees’ wages are fully deductible, including any bonuses and commissions, as long as the payments are deemed ordinary, reasonable, and for services rendered. You can also deduct any paid time off for your employees.
The primary reason Missouri Republicans cited as the reason they had to overturn the will of the voters on Paid Leave was small businesses couldn’t afford it. Considering that the payroll expense of the employee and of someone that had to cover the leave are both fully deductible this reasoning is suspect.
In a discussion with one State Representative I asked if they had considered a different approach. Currently, there are bills to cut both corporate taxes and capital gains taxes being considered in the Missouri House of Representatives. I offered a win-win-win proposal. Instead of cutting taxes for rich folks and corporations with no benefit to Missouri workers what if they provided a tax incentive to those small businesses providing the paid leave Missourians approved in November. Of course, this incentive would be in addition to the fact that payroll is already fully deductible. The small businesses would win with a tax incentive, workers would win with paid leave, and Missouri would win by honoring the will of it’s citizens. Even legislators would win by NOT undermining the will of the voters.
(Image by Gerd Altman from Pixabay)
