According to a recent Washington Post article, Congressional leaders plan to pay special attention to the concerns of small business owners as they prepare to rewrite the nation’s tax laws.
This is certainly good news, not just for America’s small business owners, but for the communities across the country that rely on small businesses for jobs. Small businesses account for roughly 99 percent of employers in the country, but as we have written about in recent weeks, small business owners have real concerns about the future.
A new study by Ernst & Young reinforces these concerns. The accounting firm released its “entrepreneurship barometer” of G20 countries, which rates how well each country promoted entrepreneurism in five areas. While the U.S., with its strong history of small business startups, fared well in the areas of access to financing, entrepreneurial culture and education and training, the same cannot be said when it came to taxes and regulation. In that category, the United States finished 13 out of 20 countries, behind Saudi Arabia, Canada, Russia and others.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the tax and regulatory environment in this country is not as conducive to small business development and job growth as it needs to be to help facilitate our economic recovery. Unemployment is still stubbornly above seven percent, as it has been for nearly five years. With small businesses creating two out of every three new jobs in the United States each year, it is crucial to provide this engine of economic growth the environment it needs to thrive.
While rewriting the tax code will be a complex process, there is one simple step Congress can take immediately to make the lives of small business owners and their employees easier. Repealing the health insurance tax, or HIT, will save the average small business employer $500 per employee per year in health insurance premiums and free up capital for small businesses to grow and hire more people. Contact your Member of Congress today to tell them to support the effort to Stop the HIT.