
{"id":14355,"date":"2010-12-02T16:25:02","date_gmt":"2010-12-02T21:25:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/?p=14355"},"modified":"2010-12-02T16:25:02","modified_gmt":"2010-12-02T21:25:02","slug":"what-small-businesses-need","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2010\/12\/02\/what-small-businesses-need\/","title":{"rendered":"What small businesses need"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Vicky Dickson<br \/>\n<\/strong><br \/>\nI feel like I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re 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.<br \/>\nBut the truth is, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been wondering exactly which small-business owners Palin and the Tea Partiers and Republicans are talking about.<br \/>\nA 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.<br \/>\nSo we need to preserve a tax break for the rich in order to ensure that doctors and lawyers continue to create jobs? Hmmm &#8230; 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c guess what? \u00e2\u20ac\u201c trial lawyers. Bigger hmmm.<br \/>\nSmall business clearly needs help, given that half of all start-ups don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t last five years. But the help we really need isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t in tax relief; it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s with the cost of health insurance.<br \/>\nWe\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d like to provide health insurance benefits for our employees in Carrboro, but we can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t afford to. My husband\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s more favorable plan or go without insurance entirely.) But one employee who really needed the group plan was a woman who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d worked for my husband\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s company for over 30 years, to quit her job and go on Medicaid in order to be able to pay her medical bills.<br \/>\nIt\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ironic then that Republicans and Tea Partiers are calling for the repeal of Obama\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re done paying for the $10,000-plus shoulder surgery my husband had in 2009.<br \/>\n We look at Obama\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t dream of providing to our employees.<br \/>\nSo if they really do value small business, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d 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.<br \/>\nI know that Sarah Palin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s unlikely to reverse her position on tax cuts, given the amount of money she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not surprising that she would want to keep as much of her earnings as she can. But I wish she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d just say that, and quit using small-business owners like me and my husband as cover for her real motivation.<br \/>\nAnd 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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?<br \/>\n<em>Vicky Dickson is co-owner of The Carrboro Citizen. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Small business clearly needs help, given that half of all start-ups don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t last five years. But the help we really need isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t in tax relief; it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s with the cost of health insurance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14355"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14356,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14355\/revisions\/14356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}