By Sheff Richey
On March 7, ASHA joined in coalition with real estate industry partners to ask Congress to reject any cap or limit to the deductibility of business-related property taxes, otherwise known as business SALT (B-SALT).
Property taxes paid by businesses are fundamentally different from state and local individual income taxes. Property taxes are an unavoidable expense, an inescapable cost of operating any business, large or small, public or private. Eliminating the business deduction for property taxes would be the equivalent of raising business owners’ property tax bills by roughly 40 percent, causing employers to owe federal tax on money that they do not have. It would lead to insolvencies and foreclosures, and it would cause self-inflicted injury to the U.S. economy, including unnecessary job losses, pressure on rents for families and individuals, and other inflationary cost increases for American consumers.