By Vicky Dickson
I feel like I’ve been co-opted. My husband and I own a small business, this newspaper, and for all our adult lives have depended on income from another small, family-held business in Raeford. So we’re apparently the people that George Bush and Sarah Palin are referring to when they use the jobs created by small-business owners as justification for the extension of tax cuts for the wealthy.
But the truth is, we’ve never had the kind of small-business income that would come close to the $250,000 threshold for the tax. Since we know a number of small-business owners who seem to be in the same boat we are, we’ve been wondering exactly which small-business owners Palin and the Tea Partiers and Republicans are talking about.
A small minority, according to the Tax Policy Center. Their study of tax returns determined that only about 2 percent of small businesses would even be subject to the tax. And many of those are proprietorships owned by doctors and lawyers.
So we need to preserve a tax break for the rich in order to ensure that doctors and lawyers continue to create jobs? Hmmm … Looks to me like the health care industry is pretty well set, job-wise, with the aging of the baby boomers. And the lawyers I know who make the kind of money that would subject them to the tax are – guess what? – trial lawyers. Bigger hmmm.
Small business clearly needs help, given that half of all start-ups don’t last five years. But the help we really need isn’t in tax relief; it’s with the cost of health insurance.
We’d like to provide health insurance benefits for our employees in Carrboro, but we can’t afford to. My husband’s Raeford business had its long-standing Blue Cross Blue Shield plan canceled due to lack of enrollment. (Like all small group plans, it was expensive, and a majority of his employees either chose to go with a spouse’s more favorable plan or go without insurance entirely.) But one employee who really needed the group plan was a woman who’d had a heart attack. When the company plan was canceled and she looked into an individual policy, she was quoted $3,200 a month. So the lack of affordable health insurance forced a loyal employee, one who’d worked for my husband’s company for over 30 years, to quit her job and go on Medicaid in order to be able to pay her medical bills.
It’s ironic then that Republicans and Tea Partiers are calling for the repeal of Obama’s health care plan. Has Sarah Palin or George Bush ever had to buy an individual health care policy? Our Blue Cross individual policy, though it costs close to $400 a month, has a $10,000 deductible – which means that when my doctor recommends a yearly breast MRI, at a cost of $ 1,000 to $3,000, I really have to think about it. And maybe put it off until we’re done paying for the $10,000-plus shoulder surgery my husband had in 2009.
We look at Obama’s health care plan as a lifeline for small businesses like ours. Competing with big business is hard enough without contending with their ability to offer health care benefits we couldn’t dream of providing to our employees.
So if they really do value small business, we’d like Republicans and Tea Partiers to reconsider their commitment to repealing health care reform. And also think about how much of the plan could be funded by taxing hedge-fund billionaires and corporate CEOs at a higher rate.
I know that Sarah Palin’s unlikely to reverse her position on tax cuts, given the amount of money she’ll save if the cuts are extended. One weekly episode of her new reality show reportedly pays Palin enough to put her at the $250,000 threshold, so I guess it’s not surprising that she would want to keep as much of her earnings as she can. But I wish she’d just say that, and quit using small-business owners like me and my husband as cover for her real motivation.
And I wish her supporters, and all those who voted for the Republicans who promised to do away with health care reform and permanently extend tax cuts for the wealthy, would think about what those policies are likely to lead to. Even if they aren’t disturbed by the prospect of an ever-widening gap between rich and poor in this country, do they really want to continue to tilt the playing field to the big businesses that export jobs and against the small businesses that create them?
Vicky Dickson is co-owner of The Carrboro Citizen.
2 thoughts on “What small businesses need”
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My Carolina loving daughter who lives in FL sent this article to me. Your reach is far and wide…. Amazed, is what we both were when we read that the businesses affected by the tax cut/break etc were but 2%.
I knew it must be a small group, as we listened to Mitt Romney skirt the topic and talk jibberish when asked about how many would actually be affected on Jay Leno last night. They just don’t get it!
My grandson always asks me who “THEY” are. I wish I knew. Apparently no one wants to take credit or blame for the mess we are in. God Bless Us Everyone! Judy in Boone, NC
As clear and astute an analysis of the matter as I have read. Keep plugging!