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Thursday, August 20, 2015

You’re Killing Me: Regulations, Government Unions, And Taxes Quash Small Business

Since our founding, the American Dream has been entwined with self-employment — whether as a farmer, a shopkeeper, a doctor, or an inventor — Americans have been at home in our “commercial republic.”

The mounting tide of often opaque federal and state rules is making it tough for small business.

A California study estimated that regulatory compliance costs in the Golden State dinged the average small business for $134,000 per year. This has contributed to what Jon Lieber, chief economist of Thumbtack.com, a firm that links consumers to businesses, said is, “a crisis of entrepreneurship in the United States (with a) broad collapse of self-employment across industries and states…” with “Small business owners … frequently frustrated by unnecessary bureaucratic obstacles.” This has contributed to an ongoing decline in business starts.

Lieber is describing the “soft despotism” that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of in Democracy in America 180 years ago when he foresaw a nation tied down by “a network of small complicated rules.”

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The treasury has brought in a record 3 trillion in taxes because most business taxes have doubled in the last 2 years.