Getting Down to (Small) Business
While the civilized world is enamored with our young president and the less civilized world is rattling its sabers, small business is working to bring the economy back. The old phrase “You can run but you can’t hide” sums up the truth about our president’s European trip. He can try to get away from the economic problems, but he can’t hide from them. With talk of trips to Russia and China later this year with his 500-member staff in tow, when will we get down to (small) business?
Most of us work for companies with 50 or fewer employees, and most of the new jobs over the last decade have come from small businesses. No one is going to say small business is “too big to fail.” Remember the “dotcom bubble” of the late 1990s? Are all the dotcom businesses gone? Some of them are, but the online world of shopping, banking, and living has not decreased or gone away; it has grown. Booms and busts in the market exist for a reason: to clean out the dead wood and to make way for new opportunities.
There’s been a great deal of focus on GM, Chrysler, and AIG, and with the investment of billions of taxpayer dollars there should be focus. However, you don’t jumpstart an economy with declining industries. You jumpstart the economy by making government get out of the way, lowering taxes, and simplifying regulation.
A few weeks ago, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner unveiled the administration’s plan to boost small business and insisted relatively few small business owners would be affected. Geithner told Congress (subscription required) in one of his many appearances, “Now, I just want to pause here for one second, those proposed changes in tax rates would apply to only 2 to 3 percent of small business owners across the country, only 2 to 3 percent. Ninety-five percent of small-business owners … have incomes below that threshold of $250,000.“
This seems like a logical enough statement, but you have to look deeper to discover the truth. Most small business owners pay taxes on their profits by filing their taxes on the standard 1040 form. In addition, most of these family-owned business incomes fall well under the Obama administration’s $250,000 per year benchmark. If the small business policies are instituted as proposed, most of these families will pay more taxes, not less. In addition, these small businesses are the ones creating jobs, even now in this economy. If Obama’s business policy is passed and signed into law, it will take money out of the small business sector, cost jobs, and shrink investment.
AMEN. My husband and I have owned a small business for over 20 years now…we are feeling the pain but we trudge along and keep our employees employed and work are butts off hoping for the best. Obama wants to wipe out the middle class… TRUTH.
Our buts not ‘are’ butts.
Meh. I need to sleep. lol
“He doesn’t have a small business frame of reference but he’d better get one soon.”
He does not have experience in anything !
POTUS is not the position for on the job training.
I know nobody has POTUS training,but a POTUS should at least have run a business or managed people in a real job.
Maybe have a voting record with a position in his previous job as a senator.
Even a girl scout or boy scout has a much better grasp on economics than this community organizer will ever learn from his law breaking tax cheat cabinet .
The world knows how all this is going to play out and the sheep that elected him are blind to facts.
Being a libertarian minded student I have to ask what does “simplifying regulation” even mean?
Joe the Plumber exposed his troo intent.
The primary safe haven for tax exemption in small business is drugs and prostitution.
Don’t you find it crazy you said “European leadership” (ALSO) doesn’t agree? Snice when do they dictate how we run our economy? Snice when does what they think matter? Though, I do agree with the “American people” when it comes to another obama stimulus spending bill.
I am convinced the former Community Organizer is a psychic vampire; he drains the life force of all around him like a parasite.
Wipe out small business. Herd all workers into unions at large corporations that are politically dependent and connected to the federal government. Make the unions dependent on the federal government for favors. Bingo, we have a corporatist state, with everyone at every level somehow beholden to the federal government.
TO: Martha Zoller
RE: Targeting Small Business
“Obama is proposing tax hikes on small businesses, but they’re the ones currently creating jobs.” — Martha Zoller
They are the latter-day kulaks. They are too numerous to ‘buy’, i.e., control, via the ‘bail-out’ monies, see what happened to the CEO of GM and how Obama won’t accept returned funding from banks.
So they have to be done-in by taxation, as they’ll compete with government controlled big-business. Just like Lenin did in Russia in the late 1920s.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[History repeats itself....]
Good points in the article. Anyone who looks at the situation for small business should be terrified, as that’s the economic pipeline of our country – i.e. some of today’s small businesses will be tomorrow’s industry leaders. Small companies are clobbered by taxes and regulations and don’t even have a chance. Venture capital in this country is basically dead and all of the IPOs are going to London.
Big businesses are actually better prepared for Obamanomics because they can change their financial structure, move resources offshore, lobby for tax breaks, etc. Look at Google, they’re trying to grab a share of stimulus money and at the same time setting up a development center in Prague. That’s how you play the game.
But small businesses have no defenses at all and the instant they become even a little successful they end up in an almost 50% tax bracket. Nobody is going to risk their savings to start a company when half of the profits will just go to the government.
What the Obamabots do not understand: that businesses and industries have life cycles. Large corporations are net job shedders. They have arrived at a point where, in most cases, they can only grow the bottom like by cutting costs.
Small, entrepreneurial companies are where most of the net job creation comes from.
Ask anyone in my line of work. I do stock research for a living. I B-School we learned about these cycles, and in the real world we see this play out all the time. Only people who have no background in economics, business and finance understand this. And Obonga is one of those people.
Obonga is a four-year-and-out president. I think it’s pretty obvious to smart people who are sizing up the situation as it really is, without bias or an agenda. But first a lot of the 53% who voted for him are going to have to be slapped hard by reality. We don’t need to get all of them. Just a very large minority of them will be more than enough to overcome last year’s margin of victory and even ACORN’s efforts at sabotaging elections.
We just have to hang in there. Work hard. Survive. In our own ways make a difference. These are going to be very trying times, on the economy and in foreign policy. Hang in there. We are not defeated yet.
The new administration, it’s bureaucracy, and our congressional “leaders” are spiraling our nation into socialism, communism, totalitarianism,tyranny, and marxism collectively and simultaneously. Get rid of them all, since they will never accept term limits, then throw them out with your vote over and over again until the public servants get it! If you have children and grandchildren and you continur to sit on your laurels while they systematically destroy your children’s future, you are no better than a they are and a poor representative to your own flesh and blood. Shame on US!
This confuses me.
“This seems like a logical enough statement, but you have to look deeper to discover the truth. Most small business owners pay taxes on their profits by filing their taxes on the standard 1040 form. In addition, most of these family-owned business incomes fall well under the Obama administration’s $250,000 per year benchmark. If the small business policies are instituted as proposed, most of these families will pay more taxes, not less.”
There is a leap that is not substantiated.
What policies to be implemented will make someone using a 1040 form pay more taxes?
I’m with Gary @ #13… someone explain this please.