By John Welbes (Pioneer Press):
The Max and Dave tour kicked off Monday in St. Paul, as the Washington’s top tax-law writers sought input on tax reform from executives and employees at local big and small businesses.
U.S. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., visited the 3M Co. in Maplewood and Baldinger Bakery, a family-owned business on the East Side, looking for citizen input on changes to the U.S. tax code.
Baucus is chairman of the Senate Tax Committee, and Camp leads the Ways and Means Committee in the House, and both want tax reform. Whether they can craft legislation that can win bipartisan support in a divided Congress remains to be seen.
The St. Paul stops were the first in a series of visits the two plan to make to U.S. cities and industries in coming months.
Baucus and Camp heard a stream of requests for a simplified tax code as they made their way around the East Side businesses. While the corporate tax rate was mentioned at 3M, many individual taxpayers want reform, and small businesses do, too, Baucus said.
3M, the diversified maker of reflective road markings, office goods such as Scotch tape and Post-it notes, dental filling material and thousands of other products, gets about two-thirds of its revenue from outside the U.S.
“We’ve gone from an industrial company to a health care company,” Fred Palensky, 3M’s executive vice president of research and development, told the politicians, mentioning the breadth of the company’s businesses. “We’re in the business of solving problems.”
Baucus and Camp also met with about 100 3M employees, including Lauri Ink, who noted that some 3M products are losing out to Canadian competitors and asked if the U.S. tax rate can be lowered.
Camp said he thinks the corporate rate can come down.
“The environment has changed,” he said. “It’s a dynamic world out there and our tax code is static.”
Baucus had noted earlier that other countries have updated their tax codes, but the U.S. has not. Responding to a question, he said that getting the U.S. corporate rate down to 25 percent would be “a bit of a stretch,” but they would try.
The stop at 3M “gives me a lot of encouragement to keep doing what we’re trying to do,” Camp said as that tour ended.
“I think the average family should be able to fill out their own taxes without having to hire a preparer,” he added. “That’s virtually impossible now.”
Later, wearing hairnets, hardhats and white lab coats, Baucus and Camp toured Baldinger Bakery, a recently constructed commercial bakery on St. Paul’s East Side that is a major supplier of buns for McDonald’s restaurants.
The two saw a river of buns snaking their way through the plant, which traces its roots to 1888 in St. Paul and now does about $30 million in revenue per year.
Baldinger had looked at locations outside of St. Paul when it needed an upgraded facility in 2010. But the operation was able to benefit from several tax breaks, including the new market tax credit, said Steve Baldinger, the company’s president.
That tax program was set up by Congress in 2000 to encourage new investment in low-income communities. St. Paul’s East Side neighborhood has higher unemployment than other areas of the Twin Cities, Baldinger said. The baker now has 90 full-time employees, and has space for additional production lines.
Those business-aiding parts of the tax code do work, Baldinger said, and “we need tax policy that supports companies that are here,” not those that are moving jobs overseas.
Both legislators said they were glad to get input from business people and employees in the Midwest.
“You can learn so much by getting out of Washington,” Baucus said.
Camp and Baucus also have a website, taxreform.gov, and a Twitter feed, @simplertaxes, where citizens can get information and give input about tax reform.
Many of the comments on the website have asked for simplification of the tax code, and relief for small-business owners burdened by time-consuming tax work, Baucus said.