Thursday, May 06, 2010

Understanding small businesses

Years ago, I was talking to an owner of a plating business who told me about their state of the art discharge system.

In the plating business, there are lot's of chemicals discharged into the sewage and companies are accountable for that discharge with the local sewage district.

In any event, this owner was telling me that their system kept going off for unusually high levels of phosphorous in their discharge; something not related to their production. No one could figure out where this discharge was coming from, until one day the plant foreman walked by a utility tub and saw some aprons soaking in your common everyday laundry detergent and that was the cause of the alarms.

He made the point that if your everyday consumer had to abide by the laws of businesses, there would be riots in the streets.

The same is true of lawn treatments. You can go to Lowe's and dump as much fertilizer, insecticide and herbicide in your yard but if a lawn treatment company does the same; there will be fines and licenses revoked.

In addition, you sit in your home with your $30 a month phone line, while a commerical business line is $65 a line. Your high speed line is $30, mine is $70. Your utility rates are capped by PUCO, a small business gets no such treatment.

What about taxes? You file a federal, state, and local income tax return a year, what about businesses?

Tax Girl has a post on the PA amnesty plan...........

I’ve also assumed that returns are required to be submitted quarterly. For some businesses, the requirement is for monthly filings – boosting the number of returns due by an amazing twenty-four additional submissions per year.

So, just for the basics, a small business can expect to pay up to – and in some cases more than – forty-three tax returns. In one year.

Do you think it’s possible – just possible – that a small business owner might miss one or two? Or three or four?

Does that make him or her a scofflaw? I say no.


But you don't have any compassion for that small business guy because he probably makes too much money.

More......

2 comments:

Shakes The Clown said...

It is also a reason for businesses leaving certain states and certain cities.

"The politicians haven't learned. They still think government is the key to revitalization. While Indianapolis privatized services, Cleveland prefers state capitalism. It owns and operates a big grocery store, the West Side Market. Typical of government, it's open only four days a week, and two of those days it closes at 4 p.m. The city doesn't maintain the market very well. Despite those cost savings, the city manages to lose money running the market. It also loses money running golf courses -- $400,000 last year.

Another way that cities like Cleveland cause their own decline is through regulations that make building anything a long drawn-out affair. Cleveland has 22 different zoning designations and 673 pages of zoning guidelines.

By contrast, Houston has almost no zoning. This permits a mix of uses and styles that gives the city vitality. And the paperwork in Houston is so light that a business can get going in a single afternoon. In Cleveland, one politician bragged that he helped a business get though the red tape in "just 18 months."

Read more: http://stossel.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2010/03/17/politicians-smother-cities/#ixzz0n9fVAg6Y

Anonymous said...

That's the nature of government. It sees itself as the only solution to every problem. And the leftist media propagates this notion. That's why, as much of a story as it is, the euro sovereign debt crisis is still being way under reported.

There is still this notion that it's a currency problem, when really a wealth creation problem. The eurozone govts are really good at moving money around, but they have no clue about creating wealth. Consequently Greece, whose citizens want a first world standard of living, but whose productivity is third world, is starting to show the flaws in it's socialized system. The protesters there might as well be protesting the existance of gravity. Because It is no longer a problem of wealth distribution. It's a problem of wealth creation. And it's a problem that a government is powerless to solve.

We will not see it interpreted this way in the news because to do so would be tantamount to an admission that government is powerless here. If someone needs a bailout fine. But what if the bailers need to be bailed? That's what we have here.

Will it take catatrophic collapse of the world economy to prove to people that govt is not the answer? I'm afraid so.