Advocacy News – June 29, 2021
In a year where Michigan businesses purchased a tremendous amount of face masks, disinfectants and other items to protect their customers and employees from the highly contagious COVID-19 virus, legislation refunding the sales tax on these purchases makes perfect sense. After all:
- The State never expected to receive the sales tax revenues they did on personal protection equipment (PPE). The only reason massive amounts of PPE were purchased was because of the pandemic. The revenue lost from this exemption is revenue the State never expected to receive.
- Businesses, facing unprecedented challenges, need this tax relief to ensure a quick economic recovery, and refunding tax paid on buying PPE and doing the right thing seems like a commonsense way to provide such relief to struggling businesses.
- Considering the Governor has vetoed every broad-based, fair and reasonable attempt at offering negatively impacted businesses financial relief, this new approach seemed to have a lot of merit.
The Michigan Chamber strongly supported refunding the sales tax job providers paid on PPE. The Governor’s veto is an absolute shock, and frankly, incomprehensible. HB 4224 and HB 4225 received overwhelming bipartisan support, with a favorable 102-7 vote in the House and unanimous support in the Senate.
These bills reflected a solution to a problem that was crafted in a manner that should be viewed as a model for problem-solving on all the major issues our state faces. Legislators from both sides of the aisle diligently negotiated this proposal and worked together, to get it across the finish line. Instead of discrediting all this hard work with a veto, Governor Whitmer should learn from this effort and see that when people from both parties and all areas of our State listen to each other and work together, good things can happen.
When it comes to business relief related to the pandemic, Governor Whitmer has vetoed every broad-based, fair proposal sent to her, all of which have received widespread bipartisan support. There have been many meaningful proposals developed and passed with strong support from Democrats and Republicans. Unfortunately, job providers and employees never received the relief proposed by the Governor’s veto pen. The business community and a bipartisan coalition of legislators have done good work; unfortunately, the Governor continues to put politics ahead of good policy.
Governor Whitmer still looks as if she wants to “go at it alone” and ignore the People’s Branch of state government. Will this trend ever end?
For more information on the Governor’s veto, please contact Dan Papineau at dpapineau@michamber.com.