Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton rolled out a list of proposals today to make it easier to start a small business, get financing, file taxes and offer health care to employees, in addition to providing tax relief.

Clinton’s proposal directly addresses two major complaints of small businesses:  Too much red tape and too many taxes that combine to stymie growth of small businesses.

Details of the proposals are outlined on the campaign’s website at http://www.hillaryclinton.com and were to be publicly unveiled by vice presidenrtial nominee Tim Kaine at a roundtable in Colorado. Clinton will speak to small-business owners via conference call while fundraisng in California.

Among other things, the plan would:

• Push states to make it easier and cheaper to start a small business by streamlining unnecessary licensing programs. Those that do will receive federal funding to support innovative programs and offset lost licensing revenue.
• Provide incubators, mentoring and training to 50,000 entrepreneurs and small businesses in underserved communities.
• Allow four million small businesses with gross receipts under $1 million to take advantage of “checkbook accounting.” The premise here is that filing taxes for these small businesses should be as simple as maintaining a checkbook. Clinton would also simplify accounting and tax filing for small businesses with $25 million or less in gross receipts, by replacing complicated rules and letting businesses under this threshold choose the simpler “cash accounting” method.
• Clinton also said she would work to create a new standard deduction for small businesses, similar to the one currently available to individual filers, allow small business to immediately expense up to $1 million in new investments, rewarding them for expanding factories or buying new equipment to boost growth and hiring and quadrupling the start-up tax deduction to lower the cost of starting a small business.
• Simplify and expand the healthcare tax credit for small employers in Obamacare so that more employers can provide affordable healthcare to their workers.

The Clinton campaign said the proposals would be paid for by closing corporate tax loopholes that enable corporations to outsource jobs and offshore profits.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has proposed capping the corporate tax rate at 15 percent and placing a moratorium on all new federal rules and regulations until their impact on business can be evaluated.

When you interview small business owners, regardless of their political affiliation, they invariably talk about taxes and regulations, and usually the conversation is about how burdensome they are an damaging to growth prospects.

Now, that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton have flushed out their economic proposals, we can bet a better sense of how they would treat small business, provided their proposals ever become law.

Let me stipulate at the outset, I’m no fan of Trump and I don’t trust him with the nuclear codes. However, if you’re a small business owner, and taxes and regulations are your main concern, Trump’s proposals are music to your ears.

Trump wants to lower the corporate tax rate to 15 percent from the current 35 percent. Under his plan, unincorporated businesses would benefit from the same lower rate as corporations, instead of reporting business income under the so-called “pass-through” rate on their individual returns as they do today. That would amount to a big break for most small business owners, entrepreneurs and perhaps solopreneurs, as well.

Clinton said in her economic speech last week she wants to provide tax relief and tax simplification for small businesses, and pitched tax credits for businesses that hire workers from apprenticeships or share profits with their workers. She does not support lowering the present corporate tax rate and would mandate a minimum 30 percent personal rate on individuals making more than $1 million annually. (Those making more than $5 million annually would pay a 4 percent surcharge.)

However, Clinton’s proposal drew the ire of the National Federation of Independent Business, a small business advocacy group. NFIB says it wants to know why Clinton “rejects out of hand a lower tax rate for pass-through businesses. Cutting their taxes means letting them reinvest in growth and jobs.”

Federal regulations can also be a real drag on business creation and growth. In 2015, 3,378 new rules were finalized and another 2,334 were proposed, totaling more than 81,400 pages, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank. Overegulation drains small-business capital, reduces profits and impedes revenue growth.

Trump is calling for a temporary moratorium on all new federal regulations to give businesses a break from the onslaught of new rules. He also wants every federal agency to scrutinize and eliminate unnecessary and job-killing regulations.

Clinton said she wants to cut red tape for small businesses, and has called specifically for providing relief to community banks, who are frequent lenders to small businesses, that are being squeezed by regulations that don’t make sense for their size and mission, such as the endless examinations and paperwork designed for banks that measure their assets in billions.

One thing both candidates agree on is eliminating the so-called “carried-interest” tax loophole that allows venture capitalists to treat their earnings as capital gains instead of ordinary income. Capital gains currently carry a tax rate of 23.8 percent while the top rate for ordinary income is 39.6 percent.