Friday, December 09, 2022
Entertainment Unions Urge Congress to Restore Tax Fairness for the Industry’s Workers
Department for Professional Employees, AFL-CIO: Americans will soon start gathering their receipts and documents to prepare their taxes, and entertainment workers anticipate owing unnecessarily burdensome amounts in taxes because they are unable to deduct required work expenses. In a letter sent today, unions of entertainment workers affiliated with the Department for Professional Employees, AFL-CIO (DPE) call on Congress to restore tax fairness for these middle-class creative professionals by passing the bipartisan Performing Artist Tax Parity Act (PATPA), S. 2872/H.R. 4750.
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3 comments:
This was one of the things that I believe Trump did - all while saying he was pro working class. Removing this tax credit for working artists hurts the middle class. These people are saving $1000 here and $1500 there which is small potatoes in comparison to “non-profit” hospital systems like UPMC not paying taxes and rich people and organizations sheltering their money in offshore accounts. I’d never heard of the statistic that up to 30% of entertainment industry employee income is going to work related expenses. I have not done the specific research on this, but I was told I might be able to get a tax deduction on my food this summer because I had to travel for work for less than 6 months or whatever the threshold is. It seems like a very reasonable bill to pass to help the people that need it the most, but I’m guessing it won’t have a chance considering we are twenty days away from the new year.
I really hope this gets fixed before taxes this year. With everything that the arts industry has been through in the past three years being able to utilize these deductions is highly important for people to survive in the industry. I have so many friends who relied on the deductions prior to 2019. As someone who filed my 2019 taxes when all of my income that year was from being an independent contractor who made less than $16k the lack of the deductions was a massive burden on me. I ended up owing $1200 in taxes that year which could have been partially alleviated if there had been more deductions available that year. I don’t look forward to stepping out into the industry with these deductions gone. I hope that the Biden administration will do something to fix this. If not, it’s going to be rough getting more artists to come back to the industry.
I always love it when there is a dollar value written into a law. Surely, that won’t backfire in a few decades when inflation means that amount is meaningless. It’s like a good spreadsheet, code, or parametric model. You don’t hardcode values into your law, you write a variable that can then update with the world around you as time changes. I hope this law passes, because as a TD how may freelance after graduation the cost of things like autoCAD is so intimidating. I then think about how I’ll need a car and the expenses that will require. If the point of tax deductions are to make it possible for people to do their job, than this bill really needs to become law so that entertainment workers can afford to do what they do. Otherwise, it will end up being a job you pay to do and we can’t have that.
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