What drives an entrepreneur to start a business? Is it solely about money? Or is there something more? I argue that often it is the same creative drive that compels an artist to paint, a musician to compose, or a sculptor to look at a piece of rough marble and see an angel inside. And those who understand the mind of the small business owner know why the proposed tax increase in 2011 will do more harm than good to the very people this economy needs most to create jobs.
On FBN’s Bulls & Bears recently Democratic strategist Jehmu Greene, the token liberal steak tossed into the wolf den of laissez faire commentators, uttered words to the effect that if we allow the Bush tax cuts to remain, the “rich” (I guess that’s me?) will not put the money into the economy but rather just squirrel it away “in their banks…It would not go into job creation or creating capital for small business.”
My first thought was: “In my bank? Really? How many businesses have you owned?” (To be fair she did co-found some internet venture called Urban Hang Suite which shuttered in 2003). But then I reminded myself that, like Ms. Greene herself who has been in non-profit and/or government almost her entire career, very few people in the Obama administration, from the president on down, have ever started a business. Thus they cannot understand what drives entrepreneurs to succeed. They think it is just about take-home pay.
It’s said that small business owners work eighteen hour days for ourselves so we don’t have to work eight hours a day for someone else. And often our income on a dollar/hour basis is less than the established firms we may have left to go on our own. Certainly this is generally true for those few scary years at the beginning when a myriad of mistakes are made and unanticipated events occur that prompt the principals to pay ourselves only after all other obligations have been met So why do it? Why take such risk?
First, the sense of pride of ownership and having built something from nothing is as strong in an entrepreneur as it is in the artists I alluded to earlier. This is often a foreign concept to those who have spent their lives in secure positions in academia, government, or as line workers and middle managers in huge firms and thus do they discount our passion to create something while passing judgments like Ms. Greene’s. Do not underestimate the fact that more than just money drives us to take such enormous personal risk.
Secondly, there is of course that brass ring of selling the firm and walking away with a nice pay-out in hand. Still, I know of very few successful entrepreneurs who upon a sale leave the world of business. Rather they look for new ventures. New challenges. New job creating entities. Name an artist satisfied at just one piece.
Now, our company’s value is enhanced by increased business. We have to grow in order to build our firm into a salable entity. And that usually means a larger workforce to generate more revenues. It’s no coincidence that the targeted 2% of Americans making north of $250k create 28% of the nation’s new jobs. The reason letting the tax breaks expire is an impediment to that growth is that many small business owners have their business and personal income intertwined. And as such a 5% tax on their personal income is a de facto 5% surcharge on their business. For someone making $1mm a year, that is a $50k hit to their business…two entry level employees. In the end, we are employers, not charity wards. We take the risks, it is our capital—and homes—at stake and so we will look to other ways to cut before reducing our own deserved compensation. So in order to make up the shortfall and keep an owner level with 2010 all else being equal, these two employees may get let go. Certainly an owner will put off hiring until he/she knows if they can afford new hands or not. The new mantra for small business is “don’t hire one until you need two.” Not the best recipe for getting the job creators excited about growing the payroll is it?
Before sitting down to write this I looked over my small company’s five-year projections. Always we try to gage our fixed costs. When we have some certainty on costs we can plan around them and ‘stress test’ to see how we survive in given revenue scenarios and prepare measures today in anticipation of any issues down the road. Then we can better tell, for example, how much interest we can afford each month on a loan (assuming we can get one) to bring in more capital and expand the firm—and hire people we need to get us to the next level and that much closer to that holy grail of being bought out while satisfying our desire to build something special along the way. But right now there is a big blank “N/A” on the spreadheet cells labeled “Federal Income Tax.” Until I know what to plug in there, it will be hard to move forward.
Jimbo3 on November 19, 2010 at 1:26 PM
Let’s address your feeble strands.
Secondly, let’s remember the macro issues of ideology and of who values free speech and who vitiates it. The history of the Left is one of hostility to dissent. This is evident through every leftist movement, is plainly observable to any person with an able political consciousness walking the earth, and has been manifested in every Leftist regime in history through their inevitable criminalizations of dissent, from post-Revolution France to Soviet Russia to communist China to Cuba to Venezuela. Do you plan on contesting this?
Rove and Bush/Cheney essentially said that anyone in the US that didn’t support the war with Iraq was unpatriotic and a dangerous fool.
False. Here is what Cheney said:
“The suggestions that’s been made by some U.S. Senators that the President of the United States or any member of this administration purposely misled the American people on pre-war intelligence is one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city.”
Here is what Bush said:
“It’s irresponsible to use politics. This is serious business making, winning this war, but it’s irresponsible to do what they’ve done.”
But what were “they” doing? They were alleging calculated lies to engage a war — to put US soldiers at risk for political purposes.
Why isn’t it within the president’s rights when accused of lying (directly accused by Howard Dean and Al Gore) to defend himself and his administration from lying? That’s also part of free speech.
He did not attempt to delegimitize the dissenters, but to counter the charges they made.
And even though he said this ONCE, even though he never accused critics of being unpatriotic, he took pains after his deliberately misinterpreted comments to qualify every speech on the war, and every point of exception to the criticism he received, to reaffirm the right of dissent. This rhetorical reaffirmation became a mantra by Bush for the rest of his presidency. Because he believed it. It is not something I’ve ever heard from Barack Obama. I have never heard him make a point to accept the legitimacy of dissent. Because he doesn’t. He doesn’t respect it or appreciate it as fundamental to freedom. He never has.
Furthermore, Bush consistently demonstrated decency in discourse and respect for his opponents, e.g., lavishing praise on Nancy Pelosi when she became House speaker, and refraining during his entire administration of singling out or even making an issue of his numberless slanderers. Bush served eight years under the most withering siege of personal attacks directed at any president in our history, including 78 studio-distributed anti-Bush and anti-war “documentaries” (the greatest flowering of dissent in American history) and also including several feature films calling for his assassination, along with a booming hate-Bush cottage industry on colleges and in the fringe media, but never reduced himself or the presidency to attacks against anybody or against the right of dissent. He never attacked MSNBC or Air America.
Rove played favorites with news reporters and television stations and newspapers, depending on whether he liked what they were writing.
So what?
Bush didn’t allow dissenters to attend many of his rallies when he was running for re-election.
Who does? Has any president in modern times invited hecklers to campaign rallies? This does not signifiy hostility to free speech, just an appreciation a certain campaign orderliness. The fact is, every time Bush addressed the media he was facing “dissenters.” Who among them was ever singled out had their taxes audited? Who among them, like Joe the Plumber, had their personal lives laid open on the op-ed pages of major newspapers just for asking an inconvenient question?
Cheney personally attacked several of his critics.
Name them. How were they “attacked”? But if so, good for him, because most were filthy liars like Joe Wilson and deserved being called out for who they were. That’s called free speech and the marketplace of competing speech. He never tried to SHUT THEM DOWN.
Cheney would not allow access to the records of people he met with to determine his proposed Energy Policies.
Cheney was vindicated on this as appropriate under Executive Privilege (which by the way, Obama has invoked more times now in two years than Bush-Cheney did in 8). Hillary Clinton, let’s remember, was fined $200,000 by Judge Lamberth for NEVER revealing the names from her Healthcare meetings.
Again, none of this has ANYTHING to do with suppressing the right to dissent.
Some of Bush’s early records have disappeared, including some of his arrest and service records. Shall I go on?
What? Yeah, sure, go on. If they’re as lame as these, we can all share a laugh.
Oh, and I didn’t see alot of people on the right defending the comments of Rick Sanchez of CNN. He said, correctly, that Jews “control” the networks (or something very similar).
Rick Sanchez is an idiot and made defamatory statements even he admitted. If people didn’t line up to defend idiocy they can hardly be accused of suppressing the right to speech or supporting institutional barriers and arbitrary authoritarian control over speech like the bill in question does. Sanchez can go write a book.
I’ll overlook your ugly comments about the “Jews.” The antisemitism of the Left is a whole other chapter in its sick history.
I don’t pat myself on the back. But you can take your “we’re equally guilty” charge and eat it. I’m not equally guilty. I’ve gone to the streets for freedom of speech, for Michael Moore and for Pat Robertson. I understand Voltaire’s maxim that mine is tied into yours (something the Left can’t understand simply because it cannot afford to — it cannot survive true “equality”).
The Left wears the blood of millions of deaths from the suppression of freedom, the blood of millions of dissenters who challenged that suppression. It seeks the same suppression now as it has throughout history. In America, its path is legislation. The police state follows.
Your sorry examples don’t come close to addressing the larger issues raised, and the great ideological Leftist drift toward the eclipse of freedom.
bench_craft_companyThis is also exciting news, as TrueType fonts are superior to SVG fonts in two very important ways: the files sizes are dramatically smaller (an especially important factor on mobile devices), and the rendering quality is much higher. ...
Read our PC news of Minecraft dev explains sales transparency.
Read our news of Jade Raymond making Splinter Cell 6.
bench_craft_companyThis is also exciting news, as TrueType fonts are superior to SVG fonts in two very important ways: the files sizes are dramatically smaller (an especially important factor on mobile devices), and the rendering quality is much higher. ...
Read our PC news of Minecraft dev explains sales transparency.
Read our news of Jade Raymond making Splinter Cell 6.
bench_craft_companyWhat drives an entrepreneur to start a business? Is it solely about money? Or is there something more? I argue that often it is the same creative drive that compels an artist to paint, a musician to compose, or a sculptor to look at a piece of rough marble and see an angel inside. And those who understand the mind of the small business owner know why the proposed tax increase in 2011 will do more harm than good to the very people this economy needs most to create jobs.
On FBN’s Bulls & Bears recently Democratic strategist Jehmu Greene, the token liberal steak tossed into the wolf den of laissez faire commentators, uttered words to the effect that if we allow the Bush tax cuts to remain, the “rich” (I guess that’s me?) will not put the money into the economy but rather just squirrel it away “in their banks…It would not go into job creation or creating capital for small business.”
My first thought was: “In my bank? Really? How many businesses have you owned?” (To be fair she did co-found some internet venture called Urban Hang Suite which shuttered in 2003). But then I reminded myself that, like Ms. Greene herself who has been in non-profit and/or government almost her entire career, very few people in the Obama administration, from the president on down, have ever started a business. Thus they cannot understand what drives entrepreneurs to succeed. They think it is just about take-home pay.
It’s said that small business owners work eighteen hour days for ourselves so we don’t have to work eight hours a day for someone else. And often our income on a dollar/hour basis is less than the established firms we may have left to go on our own. Certainly this is generally true for those few scary years at the beginning when a myriad of mistakes are made and unanticipated events occur that prompt the principals to pay ourselves only after all other obligations have been met So why do it? Why take such risk?
First, the sense of pride of ownership and having built something from nothing is as strong in an entrepreneur as it is in the artists I alluded to earlier. This is often a foreign concept to those who have spent their lives in secure positions in academia, government, or as line workers and middle managers in huge firms and thus do they discount our passion to create something while passing judgments like Ms. Greene’s. Do not underestimate the fact that more than just money drives us to take such enormous personal risk.
Secondly, there is of course that brass ring of selling the firm and walking away with a nice pay-out in hand. Still, I know of very few successful entrepreneurs who upon a sale leave the world of business. Rather they look for new ventures. New challenges. New job creating entities. Name an artist satisfied at just one piece.
Now, our company’s value is enhanced by increased business. We have to grow in order to build our firm into a salable entity. And that usually means a larger workforce to generate more revenues. It’s no coincidence that the targeted 2% of Americans making north of $250k create 28% of the nation’s new jobs. The reason letting the tax breaks expire is an impediment to that growth is that many small business owners have their business and personal income intertwined. And as such a 5% tax on their personal income is a de facto 5% surcharge on their business. For someone making $1mm a year, that is a $50k hit to their business…two entry level employees. In the end, we are employers, not charity wards. We take the risks, it is our capital—and homes—at stake and so we will look to other ways to cut before reducing our own deserved compensation. So in order to make up the shortfall and keep an owner level with 2010 all else being equal, these two employees may get let go. Certainly an owner will put off hiring until he/she knows if they can afford new hands or not. The new mantra for small business is “don’t hire one until you need two.” Not the best recipe for getting the job creators excited about growing the payroll is it?
Before sitting down to write this I looked over my small company’s five-year projections. Always we try to gage our fixed costs. When we have some certainty on costs we can plan around them and ‘stress test’ to see how we survive in given revenue scenarios and prepare measures today in anticipation of any issues down the road. Then we can better tell, for example, how much interest we can afford each month on a loan (assuming we can get one) to bring in more capital and expand the firm—and hire people we need to get us to the next level and that much closer to that holy grail of being bought out while satisfying our desire to build something special along the way. But right now there is a big blank “N/A” on the spreadheet cells labeled “Federal Income Tax.” Until I know what to plug in there, it will be hard to move forward.
Jimbo3 on November 19, 2010 at 1:26 PM
Let’s address your feeble strands.
Secondly, let’s remember the macro issues of ideology and of who values free speech and who vitiates it. The history of the Left is one of hostility to dissent. This is evident through every leftist movement, is plainly observable to any person with an able political consciousness walking the earth, and has been manifested in every Leftist regime in history through their inevitable criminalizations of dissent, from post-Revolution France to Soviet Russia to communist China to Cuba to Venezuela. Do you plan on contesting this?
Rove and Bush/Cheney essentially said that anyone in the US that didn’t support the war with Iraq was unpatriotic and a dangerous fool.
False. Here is what Cheney said:
“The suggestions that’s been made by some U.S. Senators that the President of the United States or any member of this administration purposely misled the American people on pre-war intelligence is one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city.”
Here is what Bush said:
“It’s irresponsible to use politics. This is serious business making, winning this war, but it’s irresponsible to do what they’ve done.”
But what were “they” doing? They were alleging calculated lies to engage a war — to put US soldiers at risk for political purposes.
Why isn’t it within the president’s rights when accused of lying (directly accused by Howard Dean and Al Gore) to defend himself and his administration from lying? That’s also part of free speech.
He did not attempt to delegimitize the dissenters, but to counter the charges they made.
And even though he said this ONCE, even though he never accused critics of being unpatriotic, he took pains after his deliberately misinterpreted comments to qualify every speech on the war, and every point of exception to the criticism he received, to reaffirm the right of dissent. This rhetorical reaffirmation became a mantra by Bush for the rest of his presidency. Because he believed it. It is not something I’ve ever heard from Barack Obama. I have never heard him make a point to accept the legitimacy of dissent. Because he doesn’t. He doesn’t respect it or appreciate it as fundamental to freedom. He never has.
Furthermore, Bush consistently demonstrated decency in discourse and respect for his opponents, e.g., lavishing praise on Nancy Pelosi when she became House speaker, and refraining during his entire administration of singling out or even making an issue of his numberless slanderers. Bush served eight years under the most withering siege of personal attacks directed at any president in our history, including 78 studio-distributed anti-Bush and anti-war “documentaries” (the greatest flowering of dissent in American history) and also including several feature films calling for his assassination, along with a booming hate-Bush cottage industry on colleges and in the fringe media, but never reduced himself or the presidency to attacks against anybody or against the right of dissent. He never attacked MSNBC or Air America.
Rove played favorites with news reporters and television stations and newspapers, depending on whether he liked what they were writing.
So what?
Bush didn’t allow dissenters to attend many of his rallies when he was running for re-election.
Who does? Has any president in modern times invited hecklers to campaign rallies? This does not signifiy hostility to free speech, just an appreciation a certain campaign orderliness. The fact is, every time Bush addressed the media he was facing “dissenters.” Who among them was ever singled out had their taxes audited? Who among them, like Joe the Plumber, had their personal lives laid open on the op-ed pages of major newspapers just for asking an inconvenient question?
Cheney personally attacked several of his critics.
Name them. How were they “attacked”? But if so, good for him, because most were filthy liars like Joe Wilson and deserved being called out for who they were. That’s called free speech and the marketplace of competing speech. He never tried to SHUT THEM DOWN.
Cheney would not allow access to the records of people he met with to determine his proposed Energy Policies.
Cheney was vindicated on this as appropriate under Executive Privilege (which by the way, Obama has invoked more times now in two years than Bush-Cheney did in 8). Hillary Clinton, let’s remember, was fined $200,000 by Judge Lamberth for NEVER revealing the names from her Healthcare meetings.
Again, none of this has ANYTHING to do with suppressing the right to dissent.
Some of Bush’s early records have disappeared, including some of his arrest and service records. Shall I go on?
What? Yeah, sure, go on. If they’re as lame as these, we can all share a laugh.
Oh, and I didn’t see alot of people on the right defending the comments of Rick Sanchez of CNN. He said, correctly, that Jews “control” the networks (or something very similar).
Rick Sanchez is an idiot and made defamatory statements even he admitted. If people didn’t line up to defend idiocy they can hardly be accused of suppressing the right to speech or supporting institutional barriers and arbitrary authoritarian control over speech like the bill in question does. Sanchez can go write a book.
I’ll overlook your ugly comments about the “Jews.” The antisemitism of the Left is a whole other chapter in its sick history.
I don’t pat myself on the back. But you can take your “we’re equally guilty” charge and eat it. I’m not equally guilty. I’ve gone to the streets for freedom of speech, for Michael Moore and for Pat Robertson. I understand Voltaire’s maxim that mine is tied into yours (something the Left can’t understand simply because it cannot afford to — it cannot survive true “equality”).
The Left wears the blood of millions of deaths from the suppression of freedom, the blood of millions of dissenters who challenged that suppression. It seeks the same suppression now as it has throughout history. In America, its path is legislation. The police state follows.
Your sorry examples don’t come close to addressing the larger issues raised, and the great ideological Leftist drift toward the eclipse of freedom.
bench_craft_companyThis is also exciting news, as TrueType fonts are superior to SVG fonts in two very important ways: the files sizes are dramatically smaller (an especially important factor on mobile devices), and the rendering quality is much higher. ...
Read our PC news of Minecraft dev explains sales transparency.
Read our news of Jade Raymond making Splinter Cell 6.
bench_craft_companyThis is also exciting news, as TrueType fonts are superior to SVG fonts in two very important ways: the files sizes are dramatically smaller (an especially important factor on mobile devices), and the rendering quality is much higher. ...
Read our PC news of Minecraft dev explains sales transparency.
Read our news of Jade Raymond making Splinter Cell 6.
bench_craft_company
