The Washington Wire Archive - The S Corporation Association

Talking Taxes in a Truck Episode 46: Tom Nichols on the Backdoor Tax Hike That Needs to be Repealed

Our guest is Tom Nichols, partner at the Milwaukee-based Meissner Tierney Fisher & Nichols, longtime advisor to S-Corp, and author of an excellent new piece exposing the Section 461(l) Excess Business Loss limitation for the money-grabbing fraud it is. Tom walks through the provision’s origins, the harm it does to affected businesses, and how flawed revenue estimates drove the policy. We also get into our SALT Parity efforts and how the state laws and legal analysis he drafted helped pave the way for $20 billion in annual tax savings for Main Street businesses.

This episode of the Talking Taxes in …

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admin2025-12-19T16:35:04+00:00December 19, 2025|

Taxing Losses

Tom Nichols, a shareholder at Milwaukee’s Meissner Tierney Fisher & Nichols and a longtime S-Corp advisor, is out with a great piece in Tax Notes that takes aim at the poorly-crafted Section 461(l) excess business loss limitation. “A Problematic Solution to a Nonexistent Problem” breaks down the provision, its real-world consequences, and the flawed policy rationale that led to its inception.

Prior to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, active pass-through business losses were used by owners to offset wages, investment income, and other business income. This treatment reflected the basic principle that income taxes should be paid on an …

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admin2025-12-17T19:32:13+00:00December 17, 2025|

CTA Setback

Breaking news from the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. In a 3-0 decision issued this morning, a three-judge panel reversed our landmark district court ruling that the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) was unconstitutional.

Readers will remember that district court victory as huge win for Main Street. It not only paved the way for additional successful court challenges, it also freed FinCEN to focus on new rules that limited the CTA’s scope significantly.

Unfortunately, today’s ruling goes in the other direction. Writing for the Eleventh Circuit, Judge Brasher concluded that the CTA falls within Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause:

We …

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admin2025-12-16T21:57:13+00:00December 16, 2025|

SALT Parity Certainty

It’s been seven years since the first state enacted our SALT Parity legislation restoring the SALT deduction for pass-through businesses.

Since that time, thirty-five other states have followed suit, the IRS issued Notice 2020-75 in support of the state laws, and Congress considered but rejected several efforts to repeal or otherwise limit the deduction for pass-throughs. (As always, C corporations continue to deduct their SALT without limitation or debate.)

After all that, you’d think the tax community would accept that our SALT Parity laws are in good standing. You’d be wrong.

The latest example of hand-wringing comes from a recent …

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admin2025-12-05T19:34:29+00:00December 5, 2025|

The Reasonable American

The progressive Economic Policy Institute is out with a menu of tax hike options it hopes policymakers will consider. The paper and the related Politico interview are worthy of a response.

“A lot of people assume the public is anti-tax. But they might just be very annoyed because they think the wealthy are avoiding their obligations,” said Josh Bivens of EPI, the author of the report…

“Might” taxpayers be “annoyed” because they “think” the wealthy are avoiding their obligations? A lot of fudge factors in that sentence. Certainly the latter point rings true — polling consistently shows that Americans believe …

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admin2025-11-25T15:20:19+00:00November 25, 2025|