Posts Tagged ‘Election2010’

Congress, Obama, and Small Business

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

I’m a small business owner. I’m now reasonably successful, but I look warily at what’s coming down the pipeline in Washington (and Sacramento, for that matter) and don’t like what I see.

Today, I read a great post on the TaxGirl and see:

Get the picture? Small businesses are very often about family. Interestingly, families are the very entities that Congress has deliberately exempted from many of the breaks offered to small businesses. I’m not sure how that’s supposed to make sense.

A few minutes later I read on the TaxProfBlog the impact if the Estate Tax comes back in full (55% tax on all estates greater than $1 million). Professor Caron has linked to a study by the American Family business Foundation which purports that the reinstatement of this tax could cost over 1.3 million jobs.

Last week, I read on RothTaxUpdates how the goal of letting the Bush Tax Cuts expire is to hurt small business. Joe Kristan links to the Tax Policy Blog and notes how the huge upcoming tax increase on pass-through entities is apparently the goal. Surprise, surprise: Most small businesses and most family businesses are organized as pass-through entities.

Let me ask you, what has Congress done in the past two years that has helped small businesses? The singular accomplishments are the Stimulus Plan, Cash for Clunkers, ObamaCare, and more regulations and taxes. If anyone wonders why incumbents are feeling the heat, they don’t have to go any further.

They’re Mad as Hell and They’re Not Going to Take It Any More!

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Many of you may remember the movie classic Network:

On Tuesday, voters in Massachusetts sent a message to politicians. Massachusetts elected a Republican Senator. To put that in perspective, the last time a Republican was elected to the Senate in Massachusetts was in 1976, nearly forty years ago.

Massachusetts elects Democrats the same as the Sun rises in the eastern sky every day. But that didn’t happen on Tuesday. The why of that has to both directly and indirectly with taxes.

Massachusetts has been known informally for years as “Taxachusetts.” Actually, the Commonwealth is no longer among the “leaders” in high taxes in the U.S. It’s not that Massachusetts has gotten better; rather, other states, California included, have gotten worse. Still, Massachusetts recently had an initiative to eliminate its income tax (it failed). The current governor, Democrat Deval Patrick, has proposed tax increases. The voters in Massachusetts haven’t shown much love for that idea.

With the Massachusetts legislature and the governship in the hands of Democrats, wouldn’t voters in liberal Massachusetts be happy? Not hardly. Now add in Congress–completely in the hands of Democrats–and a Democratic President. During the past year, they have spent like there’s no tomorrow. Massachusetts residents may be liberal, but they’re not dumb. Sooner or later the bill for that spending must come due.

The last straw was the current health care “reform” measure. It doesn’t take a genius to see the money being wasted in this legislation. To get enough votes so that it would pass the Senate, giveaways (measured in billions of dollars) were done for Louisiana, Nebraska, and Connecticut; there are probably many, many more that no one knows about. After all, the legislation runs over 2,700 pages. I, and other bloggers, have noted, “It’s unpopular, unworkable, and insane, so naturally they’re in a hurry to pass it.”

Voters in Massachusetts and elsewhere want a small, nimble government. What they see coming out of Washington and the local state house is bloated bureaucracy. If you are a politician running for office this year a message has been sent. Imagine you’re going through a tunnel, and you see a light getting brighter and brighter. For those politicians who will embrace what voters want, the tunnel is at an end. I believe that for many politicians the light is an oncoming train.