Philadelphia controller blasts Phila.’s new tax plan

Last week on the It’s Our Money podcast, we asked whether everything we know about business taxes is wrong. Council members Bill Green and Maria Quinones Sanchez had introduced a bill proposing to turn the city’s business tax strategy on its head: For about a decade, Philadelphia has been on a path toward eliminating its tax on “gross receipts” (all the money a business earns, regardless of how much it spends) and taxing only profits. Green and Sanchez proposed taxing only gross receipts. Could it be possible, we wondered, that everyone in the city had been wrong for ten years?

This week, we sit down with Controller Alan Butkovitz, who opposes the new proposal, to see how well he can defend the current path. Take a listen, and let us know in the comments how you’d score the round.