It’s no secret that small businesses are struggling in this COVID-19 world.
Few owners have the resources to pay their leases, wages, utility bills, loan payments and other obligations with little to no revenue. Efforts are underway to try to keep these businesses from going under, though these efforts are running into significant problems.
Anything short of full revenue reimbursement means that many businesses will fail, while most of those that survive will continue to struggle well after the pandemic subsides.
Beyond the immediate relief, we also need to start thinking about ways to help small business bounce back once shutdowns and social distancing requirements are relaxed.
One cheap, easy and effective way to set the stage for rapid small business recovery is to exempt these businesses from large swaths of regulations that were mostly intended for big businesses anyway.
Helping small businesses means helping millions of people get their jobs back, creating a conducive environment for new businesses to fill the void left in the wake of the COVID-19 economic crisis, and boosting the U.S. economy.
Small businesses make up 99.7 percent of U.S. business, almost half of U.S. employment, and serve as a major source of U.S. job creation and productivity growth. How these businesses fare in the first few months after the pandemic subsides will likely determine the speed and trajectory of the U.S. economic recovery as a whole.
Zooming in on regulations is a good starting point. Regulatory costs are one of the most severe problems facing small businesses, and evidence shows that regulations disproportionately burden small businesses, compared to large ones.
Regulations also create barriers to entry that make it harder for entrepreneurs to start new businesses. Regulatory exemptions would help reduce costs and remove barriers for existing and new small businesses at a time when they need it most — when we all need it most.
Regulatory exemptions are cheap, in the fiscal sense. Unlike other efforts to help small businesses, exemptions require almost no government spending and therefore almost no taxpayer money. By focusing on regulations that were targeted mostly at big businesses, exemptions will also come at a low cost for society.
In other words, the societal benefits of these regulations mostly come from dictating what big businesses can or cannot do. Small business exemptions will leave those benefits intact.
Regulatory exemptions are a one-time fix. Many of the current approaches to helping small businesses endure the crisis rely on providing relief funds so these businesses can continue paying bills — a worthy cause, no doubt.
However, these funds will dry up quickly, and businesses will continuously need more and more while the pandemic persists, which will mean fewer and fewer funds available to help during the recovery.
Regulatory exemptions will not only be unaffected by the availability of funds, they will also provide immediate, effective relief for small businesses regardless of how long the pandemic persists.
These exemptions are also a politically feasible, bipartisan remedy. Regardless of political leaning, most policymakers understand that regulations come with some costs, even if the regulatory benefits outweigh those costs. And everyone understands the importance of small businesses because we all see the impact of them every day.
We all have family members and friends who rely on their operation for goods, services and even jobs. This is a common-sense approach that nearly everyone can get behind.
Helping individuals and businesses meet their obligations and avoid financial ruin is the first step in economic damage control, given current circumstances. While we try to find ways to provide immediate relief, we also need to think about what comes next.
Small business growth could be the key to a strong economic recovery, and it would provide new opportunities for millions of people who are already facing an uncertain economic future.
If that is to happen, we need to act now to create an environment that will allow small businesses to take the lead — an environment that is free from unnecessary burdens and barriers to creation.
Small business exemptions are a cheap, easy, and effective way to create that environment and set the stage for small businesses to lead the economic recovery.
Reprinted with Permission from - Inside Source by - Patrick A. McLaughlin and Tyler Richards
People, you see what the Demoncrats really think about small businesses: they only think that they exist to pay taxes to fund their Socialist/Communist agenda. Nancy Pelosi’s “stimulus” bill only wants to help bail out the overextended liabilities of “Blue” states and she/they think We the People should help non-citizens, also known as illegals, with taxpayer monies! In fact, they want to make them all citizens!!! I, for one, am really sick and tired of hearing Spanish being spoken rather than English. And we/government allow this when we didn’t cater to any other immigrants when I was growing up. But Barack Obama complains that Attorney General Bill Barr is ignoring “Rule of Law” by exonerating General Flynn who we now know was “set up” by Obama/his administration. Isn’t it funny that the Demoncrats can ignore “Rule of Law” when it comes to our existing immigration laws? I live in “Blue” state California where our facist dictator Governor keeps moving the goalposts on reopening our economy knowing full well that probably 40% of our small businesses will probably be out of business their livelihood and the livelihoods of their employees and their families. Yet these Jackass “Blue” state Governors don’t seem to care and in fact, would rather support having illegals take jobs when at least 30% of American citizens are out of work! We citizens in “Blue” states are already experiencing what the future will really look like under Socialist/Communist rule where the local and state police enforce ignoring our rights and freedoms guaranteed to We the People by our Constitution and Bill of Rights!
Isn’t it time to “Recall” these fascist dictator wannabes???
Well Rik, since it seems pretty clear that the fiscally sane and literate people still living in California aren’t willing to launch a recall petition to not only get rid of Newsom, but the entire Democrat controlled state legislature, it might well be time for folks out there to consider the only other option left to you on the table. That is have a couple of hundred thousand folks show up in Sacramento and physically remove the whole bunch from running your state into the ground. Forcing the whole lot of them to resign from their offices and have the people install suitable replacements.
Does that sound like what happens in a typical third-world dump? Yep it sure does, but honestly that is what California and just about every other blue state is well on its way to becoming. The Democrats are focused on crashing the national economy ahead of the upcoming election to win control of the WH and both houses of Congress. They don’t give a sh^t how many people go bankrupt or starve in the process. The ends justifies the means.
The alternative of just sitting back and hoping some miracle happens in the meantime to magically fix the destruction being done to the blue states by power-crazed Democrats running them isn’t a viable option. All that path will get you is a future of eating breakfast, lunch and dinner down at the local garbage dump.
Too harsh or too honest?