Are you so isolated, self absorbed or incompetent as to be completely out of touch with reality?

This is Reality: (1) Big business starts as small business. (2) 50% of all private sector jobs are with companies that have fewer than 500 employees. 20% are with companies with fewer than 20 employees. 90% of all individual companies have fewer than 20 employees.* (3) Small business has generated 60 to 80 percent of all net new jobs annually over the past decade.* (4) Small business hires 40 percent of high tech workers and produces 13 times more patents per employee than large firms.* (5) The owners of these companies, unlike large company executives, academia’s, government employees and politicians, have everything they own to lose if they fail. (3) If your “spendulas” bill passes, thousands of small businesses will fail and we may go from recession to depression and it will take a generation to recover. (*Small Business Administration Website)

Here is what it means to “have it all on the line”. My wife and I own a business with 19 employees. Only two have a college education. Nine are minorities. Sixteen are in their twenties. Fourteen are female. Fourteen make over $25 per hour. The rest make over $10. per hour. We listen to, coach, advise, hand hold and care for every one. If we fail, nineteen young people are unemployed, a bank is out several hundred thousand dollars and we lose everything.

We invested 30 years of savings and incurred debt three times that much to open the doors. We have been open eighteen months and have made payroll every other week without fail. We have not had enough revenue to take any money out of the company to date. In the current economy, it looks like we will not break even on expenses for at least six more months. Our business model is currently weathering this economic storm. If the recession becomes significantly worse we will fail. We know of many other small businesses around us that are failing now. If recovery does not begin soon, the attrition will domino.

It would require only “thousands” of dollars of tax relief and credit flow for many small businesses to make it through this time. When you allocate a few “million” to special interest projects, you view this as “small percentages” of the whole. We view this as huge waste and a direct threat to a lifetime of opportunity.

I personally looked at the bill and picked out only ten items out of hundreds that are not touted as sound bites from the media. How does it benefit small business, the primary economic engine of this great nation to spend, borrow, (not invest) the following:

(1)            $650 Million for Digital to Analog Converter box program. Why is it our responsibility to pay for this?

(2)            $800 Million Grants to AMTRAK. If Amtrak failed to support itself without Government assistance how may would lose their jobs? If we, small business fail, how many lose jobs?

(3)            As only a part of the $30 Billion dollar Highway Infrastructure Investment there is $300 Million for Indian Reservation roads, $250 Million for Park roads, $20 Million for highway surface transportation and technology training and $20 Million for disadvantaged business enterprise bonding assistance. In a depression, how many will be able to travel to and use public parks? Can I qualify as a disadvantaged business?

(4)            $1.5 Billion (with a B) for the Secretary of Heath and Human Services to “issue a report” to provide other spending recommendations.

(5)            $2.4 Billion to demonstrate carbon capture and sequestration technologies as authorized under section 702 of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. Where in the Constitution is, whatever this is, authorized?

(6)            Under the Farm Service Agency, $245 Million for “Salaries and Expenses for the purpose of maintaining and modernizing the information technology system. In this environment, is it a priority that this small bureaucracy gets new technology?

(7)            Rural Community Advancement Programs (why not say “constituent paybacks.” $33.6 Billion covering 16 line items including “broadband loans and loan guarantees”. How many jobs does this create? If a rural community cannot economically sustain itself through enterprise, why should it be subsidized?

(8)            $1.5 Billion (with a B) for the Homelessness Prevention Fund. How efficient will this bureaucracy use these funds? You can rest assured that small business would be efficient, they have to be.

(9)            $3.5 Billion for the “Assisted Housing Stability and Energy and Green Retrofit Investments”. What???

(10)       And finally, $426 Million (with an M) for Economic Stimulus Lending Program for Small Business. 4.26 one hundredth of one percent of the Stimulus Plan. This is fewer stimuli for the employers of 50% of all non governmental employees than is wasted individually on Digital Converter boxes!

How dare you waste my money, lecture anyone on ethics or business practices and expect your name to be preceded by “honorable”. Now is the time for Statesmen, not politicians. Be pragmatic. Make decisions that will work, not feel good or buy votes.  Now is a pivotal moment in history that you will be judged, by the hope and trust of generations to come.

Freeman Enterprise

February 2009

“The only true determinant of low cost and high quality is Competition. The government is a monopoly, therefore it cannot be efficient.” FreeMan Enterprise 2008

"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."

~~~~~ The late Dr. Adrian Rogers, 1931 - 2005 ~~~~~