It appears Washington is coalescing around a set of policies to help families and businesses while the economy is effectively shut down.  California’s “stay home” order is illustrative of the challenge – how do businesses survive when the government is telling everybody to stay home?

Just a week after states and localities began aggressively telling people to stay home, most businesses are confronting an indefinite period of sharply reduced demand or, in some cases, no demand at all.  For those businesses, the key question is how much cash do they have and how long can they keep their workers on payroll …

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Yesterday, over 100 business groups wrote to the Congress and the Administration requesting that the response to the economic crisis confronting us is on the same scale as steps being taken to respond to the virus itself.  Entire portions of the economy have been shut down, and already businesses are closing their doors and laying off workers.  For the economic response to be effective, it needs to be broad and it needs to be in place quickly.

Here’s the text of the letter.  You can access the pdf and the signatories here.

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We interrupted our impeachment viewing last week for a Brookings Institute briefing exploring various ways the Congress could raise taxes. A book of revenue raising recommendations accompanying the briefing weighed in at a hefty 368 pages.  According to the book’s editors, “This book is about taxes. It poses a simple question: Given that the United States needs more revenue, how should we raise it?”

It’s too early for us to digest all 368 pages, but the book raises one issue that’s worth exploring from the onset – the progressivity of the U.S. Tax Code and which direction we’re headed.  …

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Dear S-CORP Member:

The S Corporation Association recently surveyed voters and asked them how much private companies and other taxpayers should pay in taxes every year?

Almost without exception, the responses were consistent, reasonable and completely out of step with today’s rhetoric.  Voters believed family businesses should pay no more than twenty cents for every dollar of income, or about half what most actually pay and less than one-third what they would pay under a wealth tax as proposed by Senators Warren and Sanders.

How to explain the disconnect?  How can voters support reasonable tax rates on one hand and destructive …

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