Tuesday, November 29, 2011

There's No Business Like Big Business

It’s no secret that quite a few Democratic Congressional votes are for sale as needed. Of course virtually the entire Republican membership is in effect a wholly owned subsidiary of big money. Exhibit A is repealing the Bush tax cuts. The main thrust of their argument is that it would discourage “small business.” It defies simple math and common sense to claim that an entrepreneur showing a taxable profit of $300 thousand would throw in the towel faced with the “threat” of having to pay a few percentage points higher on the last fifty Gs.
 
So how has small business done now that the Great Communicator and the Compassionate Conservative have worked their wonders?  In 1980 our modest size city had three hardware stores. If you don’t know what they were ask your parents. Each had at least one person who knew what the store sold and would help you find it. Now we have none. Yes we have Home Depot and Lowe’s with their “hardware sections” and workers with precious little knowledge of what’s in them. Worse yet, items that were once available in one small building, often are now in separate departments at distant ends of the campus.
 
Back then we had at least as many locally owned pharmacies which have been replaced by behemoths like Walgreens and CVS, or by small sections in the big stores of our far flung food chains. Speaking of food it seems that local markets are also becoming an endangered species. This consolidation is symbolic and symptomatic of the direction of our entire economy. No name epitomizes it more than Walmart.
 
“One percent” has now become an epithet to much of the country, unfairly painting all the super rich with the same brush. Many feel as Warren Buffet does. But those who are driving Republican fiscal policy are only interested in small business to the extent that it’s to their competitive advantage to eliminate it. Prospective small business owners have much more to fear from big business, than they do from the IRS.
 

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