End personal property tax
As a small business owner you learn to ask “why?” The most frustrating answer is, “Because that’s the way we’ve always done it!”
Wisconsin’s personal property tax fits perfectly into this most frustrating category. It’s an inequitable antique deterrent to small business investment that needs to be eliminated from our economic landscape.
I’m a second-generation owner of a small independent health and fitness club in Hartland. Every year, we not only pay property taxes on our real estate but also must inventory and report our business personal property and its fair market value.
I spend at least a couple of days each year researching all of our personal property additions, deletions and fair market value to the best of my ability. Ever try to estiits mate the fair market value of a used desk? How about a used treadmill or a used TV? The marketplace might not even yield a purchaser, yet Wisconsin assigns arbitrary unrealistic useful life percentages and values to everything. Even though we’ve already paid sales tax on our purchases (double taxation) the personal property tax goes on forever.
Good tax policy (if there was such a thing) emphasizes similar treatment of property regardless of ownership. Yet the same equipment I mention above isn’t taxed if it’s owned by an individual (home gym) and is exempt if it’s owned by a nonprofit competitor such as our local hospital’s health club or the YMCA. The personal property tax is a pre-statehood funding relic that’s been so unpopular that during the past two centuries more than 50 special interest exemptions have gutted application. In fact, this tax currently represents less than 3% of the property tax base. Yet it still lives. Why?
I thought Wisconsin was “Open for Business.” I thought that with so called pro-business majorities in the Senate, Assembly and a pro-business governor we’d finally drive a stake through this tax relic.
Our business will celebrate its 40th anniversary this September. More than ever, hiring has become a full-time job. If this tax were eliminated, the time usually wasted in compliance could be spent finding staff, and the money we spend on personal property taxes could actually pay employees. If the goal really is to create jobs, that’s not too much to ask considering the personal property tax yields almost nothing in the way of revenue.