Wisconsin businesses don't pay their fair share

From an Associated Press story in the Capital Times by Scott Bauer:

MADISON (AP) - If Wisconsin businesses would pay the national average in state and local taxes, an additional $1.3 billion would flow to school districts, fire departments and other governmental services, a new report concluded.

The study released Wednesday by the Institute for Wisconsin's Future, a Democratic-leaning group founded in 1994 and based in Milwaukee, concludes that too many of Wisconsin's biggest profit-makers are underpaying taxes when compared with their counterparts in other states.

From a Capital Times editorial:

It doesn't come as a surprise to readers of this newspaper, but yet another study confirms that businesses in Wisconsin pay some of the lowest state taxes in America.

Corporations and businesses pick up an average of 40 percent of the typical state's tax load, according to a report Wednesday from the Institute for Wisconsin's Future, a Milwaukee think tank. But in Wisconsin, corporate taxes amount to just 35 percent of the total load.

That means, of course, that individual taxpayers must make up close to a billion-dollar-per-year shortfall. It helps explain why Wisconsin's individual taxes typically are among the nation's highest. Our neighbor Minnesota, for example, taxes individual taxpayers considerably less than Wisconsin does because Minnesota corporations pay a much higher share of the total state budget.

Posted by Ed Blume at April 12, 2007 1:28 PM
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