Let’s take a look at what our company’s publications are writing about this week:
A Louisiana State Rep. wants the anniversaries of both Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita (the forgotten sequel) to become paid holidays for state workers, according to our Deon Roberts. Strikes me as highly ironic, given the poor performance of the state government during and immediately after the storms… Kind of like the British getting a holiday in observance of the Battle of Waterloo….
In Portland, regional transit officials really, really want you to ride their free rail lines. They don’t just give you a ride from here to there, they proselytize a future urban model. I think other public transit agencies see themselves this way, but not as suavely as Metro does. According to the Daily Journal of Commerce, Metro will host a brown bag lunch with an Australian urban planner, Peter Newman, to discuss sustainability and peak oil (the theory that the earth has reached or will soon reach the point of maximum petroleum production, and from here, it’s straight downhill.) Last week, Metro hosted the UK’s Sir Rod Eddington to discuss a report on mass transit and economic competitiveness….
Far away from Portland, both in miles and reputation, lies Baltimore, where we publish the Daily Record. Web editor Jackie Sauter is both proud and a little nervous about her city’s ranking as the #1 Most Underrated City in a recent MSNBC article… Actually Portland’s on the list too, even though most people I know openly love its sustainability ethic and that big, funky used bookstore in the middle of town… Other Dolan cities on the list include Kansas City, Providence and our headquarters and spiritual home, Minneapolis… So we’ve got news operations in five out of ten… That’s a good thing, right? Always better to be underrated, or as our president says “misunderestimated….”
Speaking of our president… Here’s a helpful story for businesses thinking of buying equipment in Finance and Commerce, one of our pubs in Minneapolis. The recent stimulus package gives incentives to buy now:
The broader of the two business provisions reinstates a “bonus” depreciation package that Congress first instituted on a temporary basis after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
It enables business owners to immediately depreciate half the cost of any eligible business purchase, which includes almost any kind of equipment or machinery. Normally, that cost would be depreciated evenly over five or seven years.
For instance, a printing business that acquires a $1 million press can write down its current tax liability by $500,000.
That business can also take the normal 20 percent first-year depreciation amount on top of the bonus, resulting in a total depreciation of $600,000 on its 2008 taxes, according to Todd Taggart, a partner with the accounting and advisory firm Grant Thornton.
“If a business is in the 40 percent tax bracket, which is where most of my clients are, that produces a $240,000 tax savings for the year. So if all the other business factors are there, that definitely creates a stimulus to buy new equipment sooner rather than later,” Taggart said.
There’s no cap on those purchase costs or the eligible depreciation amount.
The second provision increases an existing tax benefit that’s useful primarily for small and mid-sized businesses, said Todd Jackson, managing director in RSM McGladrey’s tax department in Minneapolis.
That benefit, included in the Internal Revenue Code’s section 179, enables business to “expense” or reduce their 2008 tax burden by as much as $250,000 on business purchases of up to $800,000.
Pretty darn stimulating….
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