Iowa Business Owner Sounds The Alarm On Expiring Tax Cuts

Lana Pol was just a high school student when her father, Wayne, and oldest brother started Geetings Inc., a trucking company in Pella, Iowa, in 1972. 

“My father had a sixth-grade education but had a brilliant mind,” Pol told IW Features.

Now, more than 50 years later, Pol runs the family operation as its president and owner, overseeing some 68 employees across four businesses. 

“I kind of got thrown into that world that I really wasn’t expecting to be in,” she said. 

Pol’s father died unexpectedly in 1993, her mother retired at age 80, and in the years since, her older brothers have retired — “which left me as sole survivor, I always call it!” she said. But this “sole survivor” still sticks to her father’s life motto: “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.” 

That’s just one of the many reasons Pol is pleading with Congress to make permanent many of the provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that are set to expire at the end of this year. To her and many other business owners, doing tax cuts right means making them permanent.

You might know the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), commonly known as the Trump tax cuts, for the way it simplified filing your taxes. The bill also raised the standard deduction and helped corporations by lowering the tax rate. But one of the lesser-known benefits of the Trump tax cuts is the outsized effect they had on small business owners like Pol. 

“Before the tax cuts, everybody was struggling at that point, as far as small businesses. The confidence wasn’t there,” Pol recalled. “When these tax cuts came along, we saw a tremendous increase in people’s confidence. Everything seemed to start flowing a lot better, cash flow was better, and just knowing that there was help out there.”

One way Pol and her employees benefited from the TCJA was through a new pass-through business deduction (Section 199A), which allowed her to deduct 20 percent of her pass-through business income from her federal income taxes. That savings was invested right back into Geetings’ employees, she said. The company was able to provide pivotal employee raises, purchase a few more trucks, and thus hire a few more drivers.

The savings also made sure Pol could continue offering generous benefits to her employees. Geetings has always paid for 100 percent of its employees’ insurance, Pol explained. But skyrocketing insurance costs eventually tied the company’s hands, severely limiting its ability to continue offering this benefit while also giving regular employee raises. As a result, Pol said she always felt like wages were falling behind.

But thanks to the pass-through deduction, everything changed. The extra money in Geetings’ pocket allowed the company to reinvest back into its employees through raises. The trickle-down effects of those raises were significant: They made Geetings more competitive in the wage market. 

In Pella, Iowa, a city of roughly 10,000 people, Pol primarily competes for workers with two large businesses: industrial and agricultural manufacturer Vermeer and Pella Windows and Doors. The latter has its own fleet of trucks, so Geetings contends with it for drivers. And because the window manufacturer’s income is not based primarily on trucking, it can pay its drivers extremely well.

“When we got this [deduction], that just allowed us to feel more confident and, you know, having some extra income in our pocket, and we reinvested it back in our employees,” Pol said.

It’s not just Pol’s employees who benefit from the TCJA; it’s also her own family — specifically through its changes to the estate tax exemption. Exactly one year ago, Pol’s husband, Merrill, was diagnosed with cancer. Just two months later, he passed away.

“We just about made 50 years — didn’t quite get there — but I’m thankful for a lot of good years with him,” said Pol.

Before the Trump tax cuts, the estate exemption was $5.6 million for single people and roughly double for married couples. In 2018, however, the exemption jumped to $11.2 million for individuals and $22.4 million for married couples, meaning estate owners who die can pass along double the assets to their heirs before a 40 percent tax kicks in.

As a result, Pol said she went from being able to gift her children $5.6 million to $11 million should something happen to her. However, if the TCJA expires, this benefit could drop sharply back to the pre-Trump tax cut rate, leaving Pol with only $5.6 million or so left for her children.  

While Pol doesn’t know how much her assets are worth, she said that with owning multiple warehouses, her estate would easily exceed the $5.6 million threshold. “I know I have way more invested in buildings than that,” she said.

As a woman in the workforce — and especially as a mother — Pol said this possibility weighs particularly heavily on her.

“Having the financial confidence that I can pass [my estate] down to my children, that they can be successful as third-generation business owners — that, for me, is huge,” she said, adding she wants to see them “live on with my father’s legacy.”

“For so many small businesses, especially Iowa, the Midwest, the family farms — a lot of us on paper look like we have a lot, but we’re not utilizing that money. I’m planning on gifting mine to my children. You know, I’m never going to see the money I have invested, but they will,” Pol said. 

She added, “Working 50-some years, it’s really hard for me to see that money being sent away to the government when I paid income [taxes] on it all these years. I’ve invested, I paid for it, and I paid the taxes on any profits on it, so it’s really hard to see that they can take more taxes now.”

The Trump tax cuts empowered Pol and her business in other ways too. The expanded bonus depreciation, for instance, meant more money in her pocket to reinvest in the company and less money to the federal government. That cash was especially helpful when runaway inflation dramatically drove up the costs of assets, including Geetings’ fleet trucks, which, according to Pol, rocketed from about $157,000 per vehicle in 2018 to $251,000 last year.

But the effects of the tax cuts can’t be boiled down merely to a list of assets or accounts receivable. They cultivated a climate of confidence — a word Pol used again and again — that empowered business owners to be bold and forward-looking, allowing them to spend more and thus boost the economy. For Geetings, that meant adding a new 40,000-square-foot warehouse with the knowledge and “confidence” that the company would have extra money in its pocket to invest. 

If Congress doesn’t step in to make these tax cuts permanent, this kind of forward momentum threatens to grind to a halt.

“The scare is …  I’m already getting hit hard with inflation, and then [if the TCJA]  goes away, it’s like what does that look like?” Pol said. “Quite honestly, I don’t know that I’d be able to keep all the businesses open.”

D.C. lawmakers should take to heart Wayne Geetings’ life motto, a principle that still directs the business half a century later: “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.” 

If the tax cuts are worth doing — and hardworking Americans like Lana Pol show they are — then they’re worth doing right. TCJA provisions expire on Dec. 31, 2025, but companies can’t wait until the midnight hour to plan their business needs for the next year and beyond. Congress must make the tax cuts permanent, and soon.

This article was originally published by IW Features.

Kylee Griswold is the managing editor of The Federalist and a contributor to IW Features. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in communication arts/speech and an A.S. in criminal justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.