This is fast and off the top of my head, but I listened to Rep. Boehner on the morning radio chatting about how small business couldn't hire new staff if it didn't get a tax break, and my head about popped off.
Taxes are the least of our problem, buddy.
If you want to make small business more than a necessary illusion perpetuated so as to pacify us that the American Dream really is more than a way to keep the peasants down...break up the oligarchies.
Let me be clear. When I talk about small business, I don't mean firms billing between $5-$25 million, or whatever the government now thinks of as small business. Firms of that size are beyond my reach, always have been. And beyond my aspirations. And I type this, quickly and angrily, as a serial small business entrepreneur, now involved in my fourth business (that's one a decade, give or take).
Out here in the real world, here's what's going on:
We're getting killed.
Brick and mortar has been hamstrung by the big box stores and their ability to buy things far below our cost. I realize that there economies of scale which need to be honored by manufacturers. I get all that. But when WalMart is selling a book cheaper than I can buy it (as a loss leader), and it makes economic sense for me to go to WalMart to stock OUR bookstore...something's rotten in Denmark, and it ain't the cheese.
Add to that the incursions of the internet, and the rise in minimum wage, and we've been put in a vice. Now...I think minimum wage should be where it is, and higher. The problem is, our margins don't change. We don't have a way to make up that money. But our competition is so big...they can absorb it.
But the real thing we need? We need people back to work. So they can spend money in our store. Taxes are taxes. They're the price we pay for living in a tolerably free society where people don't have to suffer too much simply for being poor or stupid or incapable of taking care of themselves. For basic human decency.
If people have jobs, they have money to spend, long as the job pays something like a living wage. No jobs, no small business. It's really simple.
Y'know who benefits from tax rate changes? The big guys, because a few pennies on a few hundred million dollars adds up real quick. That's who benefits from and wants the tax breaks.
The rest of us...just want a little fairness.
Not that we're going to get it.