Well you are 100% preaching to the choir here. I am one of those crappy job holders. In the past I did save money to open my own business. I used to save a lot. And let me tell you, taxes was no problem for me. I never once paid a dime in business income taxes. You want to know why? Because I never made a profit. In fact most of the time I failed miserably. So starting and operating and expanding a small business is not going to be affected in the least bit by taxes.
But you know what the problem is? I canât save any more because I am making less money now than I was 5 years ago, and my cost of living keeps going up. Bush did absolutely nothing to help, in fact he encouraged it. Now I am trying to find ways to find skills so I can get a better job. I went to a career training school yesterday, but that costs $16,000 for 9 months. Why has the cost of living gone drastically up in the past 8 years, but yet incomes have actually fallen? That money went somewhere. Anybody want to guess where?
BTW regulation and minimum wage are of little concern when starting a business. Take a restaurant. There is actually not that much regulation. When building it, the contractor should be very aware of building codes and tell you accordingly. I guess the rest is up to the health department. They are not that strict and will work with you. Believe me, the health department is a good thing. These restaurant owners are so cheap that they wonât fix things until the health department threatens to shut them do.
And if you canât afford to pay employees a little above minimum wage for at least several months, then you were too undercapitalized in the first place. After that, if you canât afford to pay them decent, then the business is not working and would fail regardless of minimum wage. When I had one of my businesses, I couldnât afford to pay anybody because I couldnât get much business, so I just worked 80 hours a week. That business failed. It had nothing to do with minimum wage or regulation, I just got no sales. So lowering minimum wage will be detrimental because all those small businesses who you say have a tough time starting because of minimum wages, will just go out of business slightly later. It just delays the inevitable. However lower minimum wage will have a devestating effect on big prosperous corporations who simply donât care and will pay their employees less if they could. What are the employees supposes to do? They'll do nothing. If they quit, there is always someone else at the door who will work for less. The companyâs donât care.
Companyâs do not do whatâs in the best interest of employees and customers. They do whatâs best for them. They are not a charity, they are in business to make as much money as possible and at any cost. Exxon already pays a lot of taxes, yet they seem to be doing just fine. Giving them tax cuts and hoping they will reinvest, is wishful thinking. What Obama told Joe the Plummer is actually correct. Taxing him more and giving it to people, will actually increase his business because people now have more money to spend on his services. But there is 2 problems with that. 1, it is fundamentally wrong to take from one and give to another. 2, the money never ends up getting to the people it was intended for. It just gets eaten up by the government beauocracy. So we need to find other market based solutions to take back the money from the corporations so that people can have a shot at getting ahead.