Rep. Stuart Bishop on Tuesday gave up on his long-shot effort to overhaul Louisiana’s tax code.
Bishop, R-Lafayette, gave an impassioned speech on the House floor, calling on his colleagues to approve his House Bill 641 and impose a “sunset” on all tax breaks by Jan. 1, 2027.
This would cause most tax exclusions, exemptions and credit to die unless the Legislature reauthorized them one by one before 2027.
Business lobbyists, not wanting to give up their government subsidies, hated the bill and sent out floor notes calling for the House to kill it, Bishop noted.
Holding aloft the government-produced book that lists all of the tax breaks, Bishop said they total $7.5 billion a year. That’s nearly as much as the state collects in personal income and corporate taxes.
He noted that the committee he chairs, Ways and Means, heard bills this year that together would have added $2 billion more in tax breaks meant to encourage certain kinds of investments and spending. Virtually all of them died because of opposition by Bishop and Sen. Bret Allain, R-Franklin, who chairs the Revenue & Fiscal Affairs Committee, which also hears tax bills.
“The bottom line is they are costing us,” Bishop said, referring to the plethora of tax breaks. They are costing the people of Louisiana…. We cannot sustain this. You can’t lower taxes, and that is the ultimate goal, if you continue to hand out credits. We have the most archaic and broken system. And we all know it.”
Bishop then told the House that he would not ask them to vote on HB 641.
In an interview later, he said he didn’t want his colleagues in the House to take a tough vote – he said the bill would have passed – only to have the Senate reject the bill.
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