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The Impact of President Biden’s Fiscal Year 2023 Budget Proposal on Private Forest Landowners

President Biden recently released his $5.8 trillion fiscal year 2023 (FY23) budget proposal, which he plans to fund through tax hikes that may impact private forest landowners.

The budget proposal relies heavily on an annual 20% tax on taxpayers with income and assets exceeding $100 million. While the tax is being dubbed as a “billionaires tax,” taxes enacted under the guise of only affecting the wealthy inevitably end up hitting the middle class, particularly private forest landowners and businesses that have owned their land for multiple generations and therefore carry a large number of unrealized gains. FLA joined with the Family Business Coalition to send this letter to President Biden opposing this new tax.

Other tax hikes include increasing capital gains rates, increasing corporate tax rates, and eliminating like-kind exchanges and step-up in basis. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is: many of these proposals are similar to last year’s budget, which Congress rejected and will likely reject again. However, we will continue working with the Family Business coalition to oppose these aspects of the budget.

As Congress is preparing its committee appropriations bills, we are also helping our industry partners to support sufficient funding in the FY23 budget for the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program and the Wood Innovations Grant (WIG) Program.

The FIA program collects, analyzes, and reports information on the status and trends of America’s forests. This information can be used in many ways, such as evaluating wildlife habitat conditions, assessing the sustainability of ecosystem management practices, and supporting planning and decision-making activities undertaken by the public and private forestry sectors.

The WIG program provides competitive grants to projects that expand wood products and wood energy markets to support forest management and deliver economic and environmental benefits to communities.

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