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Home / Washington Business - January 2006 / Points of View: Edmund O. Schweitzer III, Ph.D. |
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Points of View: Edmund O. Schweitzer III, Ph.D. |
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Written On: January 2006 |
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April 1, 2005
Dear Governor Gregoire,
Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, Inc., headquartered in Pullman, Wash., is a family-owned and employee-owned company. We employ 1,000 people, over 700 of whom work in Pullman. We are very disappointed to learn that you have included the Death Tax in your 2005-2007 budget proposal after voters and our Supreme Court rejected it.
The Death Tax is another tax on income that has already been taxed once and sometimes twice. It penalizes hard work, savings and investment, while rewarding consumption. It slows economic growth, can cause the loss of jobs, and limits job creation. It can force family-owned and privately-held businesses to sell, either in anticipation of the tax or in order to pay it. That makes us easy targets for larger, non-local, publicly traded companies to swallow us up. How can this possibly benefit the economy of Washington?
Family businesses spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers, accountants and insurance for the purposes of estate tax planning. These resources could be put back into our businesses to hire new employees, build new buildings, or buy additional equipment.
Your proposal to exempt family farmers says that the government will pick which family businesses will win and which will lose. The government should never be in a position to pick economic winners and losers. The market is the effective mechanism for that.
We request that you drop this proposal and encourage the Washington State Legislature to do the same. We look forward to your response concerning this critical issue.
Edmund O. Schweitzer III, Ph.D.
President, Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, Inc.
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