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Clinton Releases Small Business Plan
Secretary Clinton released her eight point small business plan in August, the plan includes:
- Unlocking access to capital. We need to give small businesses—including women- and minority-owned small businesses—access to the financing they need to build, grow, and hire.
- Cutting red tape to streamline the process of starting a small business. The plan offers state and local governments new federal incentives to cut red tape and streamline unnecessary licensing to make it less costly to start a small business.
- Providing tax relief and simplification for small businesses. Simplify the rules so small businesses can track and file their taxes as easily as filling out a checkbook or printing a bank statement. And the plan would quadruple the start-up tax deduction to significantly lower the cost of starting a business.
- Incentivize health care benefits for small businesses and their employees. Expansion of the health care tax credit for small employers with up to 50 employees through the Affordable Care Act. And simplify complex phase-out and eligibility rules so that it’s easier for many more small businesses to get the credit and cover their workers.
- Opening new markets. Every small business across America should be able to enter new markets—whether those markets are across town or across the world. We should invest in the roads, bridges, ports, and airports that make it easier for small businesses to reach new customers, and encourage innovations that unlock new markers for small businesses.
- Making sure small businesses get paid—not stiffed. She will stop large companies from using expensive litigation hurdles to deny small businesses payment for services, and she’ll give small businesses recourse to take on predatory behavior. Read more here.
- Supporting small-business owners and entrepreneurs. Expand the access and availability to incubators, mentoring, and training to 50,000 entrepreneurs and small-business owners in underserved communities across the country.
- Make the federal government more responsive to small business. Guarantee a 24-hour response time to small businesses with questions about federal regulations and access to capital programs.
The NASE supports a simplified tax code which is always better for the long-term survival of small businesses. Secretary Clinton’s focus on both a standard business deduction and access to health care are two essential tools for the small business community. Offering health care benefits to employees is on point: in fact, we support this in conjunction with the flexibility of Health Reimbursement Arrangements in order to ensure small business stability and health of both their employees and businesses.
We are eager to hear more concrete proposals from the Secretary as to how she will, on day-one, move to unravel the regulatory constraints that make it difficult for small business owners to thrive. We applaud her efforts to begin this important conversation.
We are also equally excited to see from Donald J. Trump his proposals for small businesses and how he would decrease tax complexities.
Katie Vlietstra is NASE’s Vice President for Government Relations and Public Affairs