The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) recently released the third video in its month-long media campaign to promote comprehensive tax reform. The first two videos have been viewed a combined 187,000 times and have reached more than 338,000 people on Facebook.
NCBA’s latest video in the campaign features Buck Wehrbein, who manages Mead Cattle Company in Eastern Nebraska. In the video, Wehrbein discusses proposals on Capitol Hill to eliminate the deductibility of interest payments for businesses—an idea that he says would be “catastrophic” for businesses like his.
“We move 40,000-50,000 cattle through here a year, and that’s $75-$100 million and there’s interest on almost all of that money, so to lose the interest deduction would be actually catastrophic for us,” Wehrbein explained. “It’s kind of almost beyond what I could get my brain around.”
Wehrbein closed with a plea to elected officials in Washington to remember that real families and real people are going to be significantly impacted by any comprehensive tax reform legislation that is eventually enacted.
“You’re impacting real people—not the ‘beef industry,’” Wehrbein said. “It’s kind of scary to us to have our representatives talking about changing (the rules) in the middle of the game. It gets pretty real when you start impacting individuals and individual families.”
Details of NCBA’s tax reform campaign and the videos can be found online at www.CattlemenForTaxReform.com. The campaign will also connect grassroots ranchers and producers with their elected officials on Capitol Hill as tax-reform legislation is considered this autumn. — NCBA
