Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Obama's record on small business; better than what the GOP would like you to think

My column in the Sky Hi News today:

Mitt Romney is positioning himself as the white knight riding to the defense of small business. 

His campaign and His GOP cohorts cite polls that claim small business will not invest or grow because they are so uncertain about the future. It's more of a tribute to the GOP's successful twisting of facts and deceit than it is a reflection of reality. That President Obama is anti-small business is a great trick of propaganda speak. 

To make their point, they cite some statistics purporting to show that small business has suffered because of Obama's policies. However, those figures they cite are wacked. As the saying goes, “liars can figure and figures can lie.” Glenn Kessler, fact checker for the Washington Post, awarded three Pinocchios out of four for their claim and wrote: “The bottom line is that experts at the agency that generated the data and the organization that analyzed it, as well as the person who used it in congressional testimony, all say Romney is starting with the wrong date. By using the 2008 numbers, Romney essentially is comparing pre-recession figures with post-recession figures, not data that reflects what happened under President Obama. Just as with job creation under this president, the results starting from 2009 are not great, showing a slight overall decline and then modest improvement once the recession ended. As the president well knows, that uncertain result has made for a challenging re-election campaign. But Romney has goosed his figure so much that it has little credibility.” 

The line trumpeted by the GOP and Romney is that Obamacare would create such a financial burden on small business and taxes would rise if he is re-elected. That is horse feathers. In either case of personal taxes and health care, only 2 to 3 percent of small business people in the highest brackets will see any impact. Here's the truth about Obamacare. If a small business has less than 50 employees, they do not have to provide insurance, but if they wish to do it anyway, they will get a large tax credit. So do not blame the provisions of Obamacare for causing the uncertainty, blame GOP's deceitful fear mongering. More horse feathers: Most small businesses have taxes levied as part of their personal income. Even if Bush tax cuts were restored and returned to the Clinton era, if a family's personal income is less than $250,000 per year, taxes would not increase. Neither Obama nor Romney have any plans to increase taxes to the middle class, anyway. What small businesses should fear is the Ryan budget/deficit reduction plans. If they were passed by a GOP Congress and signed by a President Romney on nearly day one, there is almost a unanimous opinion among economists we would slide back into recession, just like Europe did with their austerity programs. That would be a demand killer with a disastrous blow to small businesses, which depend on middle class customers having enough extra change in their pockets to buy their goods and services. In the past three and a half years, Republicans in Congress have talked a good game, but voted the other way. They are speaking with a forked tongue Before the Tea Party grabbed control of the House of Representatives in the 2010 elections, Obama was able to get his agenda passed to help small business and the Republicans in Congress voted against every single one of them, including a new tax credit for hiring unemployed workers, bonus depreciation tax incentives to support new investment, 75 percent exclusion of small business capital gains, expansion of limits on small business, and passed the small business jobs bill: Tax cuts, loans backed through the Small Business Administration (SBA) and loans backed by the Treasury Department through the newly credited Small Business Lending Fund ($30 billion fund for small community banks).

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