Quashing Unfair Tax Insurance policies, Rising Worldwide Journey, Coaching Employees Tops ECA 2025 Sizzling Button Record

What do occasion professionals want? Exhibitions & Conferences Alliance (ECA), which advocates for the U.S. enterprise {and professional} occasions business, has issued its scorching buttons for 2025 within the type of its annual Public Coverage Agenda to reply that query.

It summarized the doc as follows: “From a tax code that incentivizes the expansion of our business’s small companies to insurance policies that assist the U.S. appeal to extra worldwide exhibitors and attendees, ECA strongly encourages policymakers to undertake the measures…that may strengthen our business’s competitiveness and talent to drive financial progress, assist job creation, empower small companies, and assist resolve our most pressing societal challenges going ahead.

Prime Priorities

Improve competitiveness via growth-focused tax insurance policies that embody federal tax reform that’s pro-growth by way of a “aggressive enterprise tax price,” pro-investment by sustaining present non-public fairness tax remedy, safeguards affiliation and affiliation nonprofit tax standing and expands 529 plans—tax-advantaged financial savings accounts designed for use for the beneficiary’s schooling bills—to cowl skilled certifications.

ECA additionally says it can prioritize stopping state and native tax insurance policies that might “unfairly goal the business.”

Help authorities insurance policies to assist appeal to and prepare the business’s future workforce. This consists of advocating for increasing Pell Grants to cowl “high-quality shorter-term abilities coaching.”

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Develop worldwide journey to extend U.S. world competitiveness. ECA helps continued discount of visa wait instances and a modernized visa processing system, and opposes any new U.S. inbound worldwide journey restrictions.

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Different Points

Though not a prime precedence, ECA additionally helps leveraging “good decarbonization” for long-term aggressive benefit. It seeks “the fitting stability between environmental goals and business feasibility.”

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It additionally helps future progress via a “aggressive working setting.” This consists of securing authorities assist for occasion cancellation insurance coverage, growing music licensing transparency and stopping “anti-competitive habits” by rights holders, establishing a “pro-innovation federal privateness statute that harmonizes present state privateness legal guidelines,” and blocking state and native efforts to “prohibit the liberty of operations of enterprise occasions.”