The State of Small Business
By Tom Quiner
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En1z2FbxoXc&feature=player_embedded]
Small business is the backbone of our economy.
Ninety-nine percent of all employer firms have fewer than five-hundred employees.
They employe more than half of all private sector employees and pay 44% of all private payroll.
They have generated 64% of all net new jobs over the past fifteen years.
In other words, our economy depends on small businesses. The key to stimulating them isn’t big government spending, it is pro-growth tax policies which moderate income taxes and lower capital gains tax rates.
Another pro-growth policy is to permanently eliminate the death tax. The death tax hurts thriving small businesses and farms because it forces the owner’s family to sell off assets to pay for the tax.
There is a huge hidden tax that impacts small business: government regulation. Each new regulation carries a compliance cost. Each new regulation increases the cost of running a business and decreases profitability, which in turn hurts job creation.
That’s not to say that all regulations are bad, nor are they all good. The trick is to balance the needs of the state with the needs of the business.
The Obama administration has our regulatory climate way out of balance.
The annual cost of regulation in the U.S. is estimated to be $1.75 TRILLION. That’s double what the government collects in income taxes.
As you can see in the video above, the Obama administration imposed $38 billion in new regulations (through mid 2011) which is the fastest increase of regulations in that time frame ever.
Small business is choking to death.
Bernie Marcus was the co-founder of Home Depot. This entrepreneur has created hundreds of thousands of jobs in the U.S. He flat out tells us that the president’s economic policies are doing grave damage to small business:
“Having built a small business into a big one, I can tell you that today the impediments that the government imposes are impossible to deal with. Home Depot would never have succeeded if we’d tried to start it today. Every day you see rules and regulations from a group of Washington bureaucrats who know nothing about running a business. And I mean every day. It’s become stifling.
If you’re a small businessman, the only way to deal with it is to work harder, put in more hours, and let people go. When you consider that something like 70% of the American people work for small businesses, you are talking about a big economic impact.”
The key to surviving the Obama economy is to “let people go.”
Earth to Obama: YOU are and YOUR policies are killing jobs.
When you listen to tonight’s State of the Union address, listen closely. Will the president lend the job creators a helping hand?
Or will this president, who has no business experience, continue the policies that have devastated working class America?
