Supporting Small Business
Continuing its excellent series for the 2016 Small Business Week, USA Today features an interview with Maria Contreras-Sweet, the Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration. Here is my favorite part of the interview:
Q: What’s a main message that you would like to get out there during Small Business Week?
A: Let’s level the playing field for small businesses. I see small businesses getting the run around at every turn. When a corporation arrives at a municipality and says, “We’re going to locate here,” that municipality says, “We’re going to give you tax breaks; we’re going to open up this for you.” When a small business shows up in City Hall, (they’re told) “Stand in line, take a ticket.”
Exactly – cities and states offering incentives, subsidies and tax breaks to large corporations are shifting the tax burden to smaller businesses and effectively acknowledging that they are such awful environments that they have to bribe large corporations (they are the ones with the clout to extract the concessions) to remain. I am glad Contreras-Sweet has a Cabinet-level position. It is so rare to have a plain-spoken person in public office.