I am proud to report that City Council has just unanimously passed the Business Tax Holiday and other tax-friendly reforms! This action will without a doubt create jobs in Los Angeles, and lay the foundation for future economic growth.
The Business Tax Holiday, developed by my office, is a simple idea. To encourage businesses to start up or relocate to LA, we will exempt all new Los Angeles enterprises from any gross receipts tax for three years.
The effectiveness of this tax reform has already been proven. My office commissioned a study at USC Marshall School of Business that suggested the Business Tax Holiday would yield NO loss in tax revenue. In fact, it would spur enough job growth to create more tax revenue. USC Professor Swenson expects that the Business Tax Holiday will create an estimated 55,000 new jobs and that each new company will generate a net revenue increase of more than $8,000 to the City.
The Business Tax Holiday is just the latest effort by our office to help attract, retain and grow businesses in Los Angeles. Our office has already worked to create the Internet Business Tax to provide tax relief to existing, highly mobile companies, and expanded the State Enterprise Zone so more companies could take advantage of various state and local taxes and power rate incentives.
I would like to especially thank Councilmembers Parks, Alarcon, and Smith for their strong leadership in pushing this through Council. Each has been a critical partner in shepherding this important tax reform towards approval.
Together, with the City Council, we sent the message loud and clear that Los Angeles is committed to leveraging every resource it has to attract businesses and put Angelenos back to work.
To access the USC study view the press release here.
Follow Antonio Villaraigosa on Twitter: www.twitter.com/villaraigosa
Ah,..... and then we are going to sock it to em. This is hardly sound economics. It reminds me of the ad on TV with the "new kid" who gets the ice cream cone and the "not so new kid" who doesn't. Why does government think creating one off special treatments will get people to risk their investment capital. If anything, it creates a "wait and see what ludicrous thing they do next" view. Think about the poor sap who just started a company.....he should shut it down and start over.
Profoundly poor thinking.
Why don't you try and help the people still in business but don't have any customers, foot traffic but lots of taxes and other fees from the city/state? Or is that just too hard of a concept!
How about trimming down some of the cities expenses? Look into the existing contracts, union commitments, salaries, overtime pay and really making some cuts to the city / state budgets. What about stop educating and paying for all the illegals in the state and investing some of our money in fraud investigations to remove waste from these parasites. (I'm not saying illegals are parasites but the ones milking / abusing our system are).
Did anyone see the cities fees for our workers, talk about a joke. Now I think it's great as a state worker you don't have to be qualified or educated just tenured. What about the airport police and asst. What about privatizing school teachers (base any new positions on interviews and past performance not tenure), prisons and stop overpaying our salaried city / state employees.
Why don't we immediately cut city budgets and eliminate all expense account for these workers???
Let's investigate all the state contracts and agreements they've established. Starting with the city councils and the mayors.