UPDATE: Trump, Clinton economic plans and impact on #smallbiz

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.

 

 

 

 

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