Small Business - Absent from Obama's Radar Screen

I’ve been thinking for the last couple of days what I want to talk to you about. It’s easy to read the daily paper and continue to criticize the rather clueless Obama administration for their incredibly amateurish handling of the economic crisis, but I don’t want to bore you. What I’d like to talk about is the way real people are being impacted. I’m talking about the people who actually work for a living and pay taxes and their mortgage, people who are not looking for a handout from the government, people who own small businesses and who support their families, friends, and relatives with jobs, the small business owners who really fuel this economy.

I volunteer for an organization called SCORE, the Service Corp of Retired Executives. We are counselors to small business entrepreneurs and provide business advice, mentoring, workshops, and seminars for start-up businesses or small business owners seeking professional advice for any business issue. SCORE is supported by an on-going grant from the U.S. Small Business Administration and independent contributors and foundations who understand the importance of this work. We have 370 Chapters across the country with 11,200 volunteers covering over 600 different business skills.

In our experience these past few months, we see many people in real trouble, particularly here in Southwest Florida, where the economy is heavily weighted towards construction, housing development, retail, and services. We actually see business people in tears suffering from worry, anxiety, and depression. These individuals are very proud and many people rely on them for jobs and they now find themselves looking at the abyss they never believed would face them. They have such pride that they could not admit what has happening to them and came to SCORE too late in the game to turn things around.

Where is the help for small business in the Stimulus package? No where to be found! We readily help those people who don’t pay any taxes and then send them a tax rebate complements of those who do. Oh yes, lets now raise the tax rate for those rich small business owners who make over $250k/yr. Let’s disincentivize them from making more money, creating more jobs, and investing to grow their business. That’s what Mr. Obama just recommended to Congress. Many small business people will now be in a 40% tax bracket, and when you combine this with State, Sales, Property, etc. taxes, most will have more than half their income confiscated by our government. How would you like to work half the year for nothing? These people are the engine of our economy; there is something wrong with this scenario.

On my next posting, I want to talk about another ingenious way this Administration is seeking to confiscate money without calling it a tax. It’s called “climate revenue” and its being driven by the falsehood that global warming is caused by greenhouse gases, or carbon dioxide, being generated by businesses that use fossil fuels (which is virtually all of them). Obviously, this must be true since one of our most renowned scientists, Al Gore, says so.