Political Lies and Small Business

 

Brace for a storm of platitudes, recycled myths, and just old-fashioned political lies.

It will all start with President Obama when he addresses a joint session of Congress on Thursday about the jobs deficit. Whatever he says will be followed by scorn and abuse from the Republicans. All the hoary old claims about the absence of leadership, wasteful spending, punitive regulation and the need to cut taxes will be regurgitated.

The president will have a TelePrompTer full of enchantment tales. He also will talk of cutting some taxes; maybe because he thinks this will endear him to the undecided voters, or mollify some Republicans, or because he consistently tries to make his way in a viciously partisan political world by endeavoring to sound like the voice of detached reason. It will make nofriends and infuriate the Democratic core. It will be another betrayal to them.

All of the tax ideas, presidential and Republican, will be wrapped in cant about small business. Oh, do politicians love small business. Apple pie is good, mom is noble but small business, and small business alone, can cause the entire Congress of the United States to genuflect.

They love the travel agent with six employees with the same passion that they adore General Electric. The machine tool repair and maintenance contractor with 40 employees – he is the very embodiment of American exceptionalism. The woman with a wholesale jewelry business that she operates with her husband and grown daughter — they are the stuff of American legend.

Nonsense.

If Congress knew anything about the small business world, it would stop forcing the wrong medicine on the patient. Incorrect therapies won’t help, no matter how vigorous the applications.

To the political establishment, small business is suffering because of taxation and regulation. Fiddle with these twin bugaboos, the political narrative goes, and small business will bloom like the bluebells in spring.

Have any of these people ever talked to small business operators? Small business has many problems, but taxation is seldom one of them. Do they really think the garment manufacturers on New York’s 7th Avenue are on the phone, schmoozing about the rate of corporate taxation? More likely they are talking about why the banks won’t lend, even against collateral, toheretofore good customers; why imports from all over Asia are laying waste to their customer base; and why the traffic in the cross-town streets is horrendous.

Like all small businessmen, they don’t agonize over the frustration of having to meet OSHA and EPA standards — these are irritants. Instead, they agonize over whether there will be enough money to meet payroll. Taxes, if any, come once a year, but the payroll keeps the smallentrepreneur anxious all year. It is the ogre that visits every two weeks.

To many, government is the problem; but not in the way legislators think. The problem is the growing shortage of federal and state funds. This affects many small businesses like builders, excavators, asphalt-layers and the service industries that owe their survival to small contracts:social service providers, translators, software writers, and consultants in just about everything.

If you cut budgets, you cut small business.

Then there is the “chaining” of America. Local diners, hardware stores, pharmacies and other retailing are crushed, annihilated when the chains move in. The chains are not inherently evil, but they are manifestly merciless. Walmart is but one of the chains putting small business to thesword.

If those who administer government want to know something about small business, they should spend a weekend at a strip-mall bakery or any other firm with less than 50 employees. The experience would radically adjust the rhetoric. It’s too late for Thursday, but don’t believe what you hear.

–For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate