Tax Foundation’s Americans for Petroleum Ties Belies ‘Objective’ Tax Report

Once again the Tax Foundation is bringing its big business, low-tax agenda to Wisconsin and trying to convince us that businesses need their taxes lowered and the owners of those big businesses need their taxes lowered.

As we have detailed at WISTAX Watch, the Tax Foundation is intimately tied to the Teabaggers’ favorite group, Americans for Prosperity.

Read our report on the ways in which the Tax Foundation skews its statistics. This in addition to the all cost, no benefit way in which groups like the Tax Foundation and WISTAX do business…to support the tax agenda of big business, makes their reports utterly useless for a fair discussion about the financial burdens facing Wisconsinites.

For one thing, Wisconsin is a low-fee state and the report provides no indication this is taken into account. This is a long gripe One Wisconsin Now has with WISTAX and as a recent analysis by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel showed, our tax burden is squarely in the middle of the country — despite the extraordinary high quality of life we have and the stellar public services (note: doesn’t not include Scott Walker’s reckless dismantling of even basic Milwaukee County public services).

Review our report and make your own (no pun intended) conclusions. The tax debate is complicated and has many perspectives. And when it comes to WISTAX and the Tax Foundation — you’re always going to get the “your taxes are too high” argument. Which may be true. But what they won’t say is that if rich people and big business weren’t able to hide away trillions of dollars in taxable assets in complicated shelters and Bush tax schemes, we’d all pay a lot less — and we get even more back in public services.