This year has been a rough one.
I run a small ad agency. Our clients have cut their budgets continuously over the last few years.
One client, an international one, has abandon the U.S. as a growing market for their product since the dollar is so low. They are now spending their advertising money in India and China.
Another client, a department of the government, has cut our actionable contracts this year down to nil because you cannot fund work as easily under a continuing resolution. They would love to do more work with us, but have their hands tied.
Finding new clients in this economy - one where no one can trust that the government will get anything passed - has been more difficult than any year prior.
Nonetheless, we soldier on. We are constantly out pitching and trying to drum up new business. We are holding onto our current clients by doing flawless work. And, naturally, look to hire more people if more new business comes in.
Why? Because that's how you grow a business. You grow not by taxing your current employees to the point of a nervous breakdown because the workload is too much for them to handle. You hire new people to pick up the pace, because when the pace is even, you don't make as many mistakes. The less mistakes you make, the more likely your clients will stay with you. The goal is not to destroy your business so the CEO can pocket all the money.
But the Tea Party doesn't seem to understand that. Looking at LaFeminista's post where they want us, the small business people, to pledge not to hire anymore until the "war" against our business is stopped is absolutely assinine.
It is obviously coming from the mind of someone who's never built a business from the ground up. And it's certainly the policy of a political party that is made up of little rich boys like Eric Cantor, Rick Santorum - and even Mitt Romney - who've either worked for daddy, went directly into politics, or inherited existing, successful companies to run that they were luckily HIRED into (that's right. Mitt Romney - despite all his claims of being an "entrepreneur" was hired into Bain Capita, an existing offshoot of the first company he was working for right out of college. The partners brought him in and he worked his way up. For that matter, Herman Cain's Godfather Pizza was an offshoot of his existing position in Pillsbury, of which he was an employee).
The simple fact is this. Put money in people's hands and they will spend it. Put money in the hands of the wealthiest like Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, or any senior executive of any large financial corporation and they will shovel it away into an offshore account as savings for their retirement - and make their current employees work three times as hard so they don't have to spend a tenth of their bonuses on one new person.
Yet, some of these Tea Partiers - people who've probably been unemployed for some time - don't have enough common sense to understand that one party is trying to help them and the other is trying to use and destroy them.
I can tell you this much. When I do start hiring again, I won't be hiring stupid people. So, if you're a Tea Partier who thinks this kind of boycott is smart, please don't send your resume my way. I need people who understand business, not arrogant, ignorant knuckleheads who think money grows on trees and stupid statements like this current one have any merit at all.