If They Are Not Reading The Prairie Blog, They Are Reading This Blog -- January 9, 2018

This is pretty cool. See this post from January 7, 2018, which links the story at The Prairie Blog. Today, of all things, up-front on the on-line edition of The Wall Street Journal, the story and headline: agriculture firms warn of unintended impact of tax law. Lawyers and accountants say the tax bill gives cooperatives a significant edge over competitors.

Wow, has a tax law ever done that before?

From the Journal:

The new U.S. tax law has placed Rick Tronson, a North Dakota grain-company operator, in a precarious position by unexpectedly bestowing big benefits on his main competitors.

A provision inserted into the tax code during Senate and House negotiations in December gave farmers more lucrative deductions when they sell agricultural products directly to the farm cooperatives he competes against rather than to businesses like his own.

Mr. Tronson, whose four storage facilities handle 17 million bushels of grain a year, said the competition could spell the end of his 76-year-old family-owned business.

“We’ve made a big investment. And this law, if they don’t change it, the scenario is that we’ll go broke,” he said.

Farm groups and agricultural cooperatives battled last year to preserve a deduction on domestic U.S. production, which manufacturers also received. That deduction went away in the tax rewrite, but lawmakers including Sen. John Hoeven (R., N.D.) won the inclusion of a new deduction.

My thoughts and comments at the original post linked above.

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For The Archives -- The Road To Connecticut

From The Hartford Courant: business leaders say state economy is in crisis.

Jim Loree, CEO of Stanley, Black & Decker, opened the meeting with a sprawling diagnosis of Connecticut’s fiscal ills. In 2001, Loree said, Connecticut was ranked the eighth-most competitive state in the country by the Beacon Hill Institute, “competitiveness” being a measure of fiscal policy, quality of life, labor supply and infrastructure. By 2016, he said, Connecticut had slipped to 43rd by the same index.

Outmigration is a well-documented phenomenon in Connecticut, but Loree singled out a telling statistic: On average, a family that moves into Connecticut has a household income of $93,000. The average income of a family moving out is $123,000. With such a fluctuating tax base, Connecticut’s income stream is “incredibly volatile,” Loree said, rendering the state “very vulnerable to market downturns.”

A disproportionate amount of tax revenues flow from a handful of well-heeled enclaves, he added. Thirty-six [percent] of the state’s personal income tax revenue comes from 10 towns, including West Hartford, Glastonbury and Fairfield County towns. Twelve percent of all personal income tax comes from 357 families alone, Loree said.

All Alone Am I, Brenda Lee