Vice President Kamala Harris will propose a tax deduction of up to $50,000 for new small businesses on Wednesday, a tenfold increase over existing relief and her latest economic policy aimed at winning over middle-class Americans after jumping into the presidential race over a month ago.
You know what would really help small businesses, like a lot? Public health insurance (covering things like vision and dental). A huge part of the cost of doing business is benefits for employees. Well, with public health insurance that’s a huge budget item that suddenly small businesses don’t have to pay.
Want to make it better? Expand social security to be something you could live off of. Boom, now you as a small business owner don’t need benefits like 401ks. Your employees will be well taken care of by a government ran pension.
Want to go a step further? Expand public housing, public transport, and food security programs. Now all the sudden a business doesn’t need to pay top dollar because the cost of living for everyone has been significantly decreased. You can easily find low wage workers and hire crews of them because the added income for everyone is more of a bonus rather than a necessity.
What else could you do? Reduce the full time work week from 40 hours to 30 hours. For a small business, it means you can actually focus on having your employees doing useful work rather than having them hang around an extra 10 hours a week doing nothing. For the employees, now they have spare time on their hands which means more opportunities to interact with the community and small businesses.
By taking care of the basic needs of the population you give the population a lot of spare capital and time. All of which can stimulate the economy to new heights.
Of course all of these things would be nice, but I just don’t think it’s an electable platform in 2024.
It’s not based in reality, but the “biden broke the ecomony” narrative has a lot of traction.
This type of policy would lose more votes than it would win.
Dam, you both sound right. And that’s some sad shit to realize.
We can both be right. My goal is showing how appealing government spending can be and is generally. The more people thinking this way, the more palatable “you know what, maybe we should have a 1000% tax on private jet and yacht fuel”.
Raising taxes on multimillionaires/billionaires should be a lot more popular than it currently is.
I chuckled a little when I read that: “Thats not how social media is supposed to work…”
I was supposed to get popcorn, and you two were supposed to fight it out over the next 12 hours arguing about the same thing without realizing it. Pfft. There went my entertainment.
(Obviously, I jest.)
Lol, I try to be reasonable. I know my positions aren’t generally popular which is why I’m not saying Kamala should campaign on them. But I could see them working quite well for a congressional or Senate seat.
Ironically, progressive positions do often play well in deep red states. It’s centrist Democrats that have a tendency to outright reject them.
That’s because half the population actually believes they’ll be as rich as those high tax brackets (which will never happen).
And there’s unregulated messaging forcing that down their throat both from foreign and national interests that benefit from them voting against their interests.
It’s not just sad, it’s one of the fundamental problems of our time. There are all of these obvious good things that government could and should be doing, but because they seem scary and revolutionary, the Democratic party is afraid (perhaps rightly so) that if that try to do them, they will lose to the Republicans. Then, people get upset that the government isn’t doing enough and seems stagnant, and that’s why candidates who seem disruptive get more attention.
On the good side of that equation, you get Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders, who became much more successful than one would think on paper, because they branded themselves as Change candidates. The dark side of that is Trump, who appeals to people who think he seems not like a normal politician, and probably to a fair number of accelerationists, too. Obviously if you think about it for thirty seconds you can see that Trump is a fucking con man first, middle, and last, but the outsider branding might be his most potent tool.
Democrats have got to acknowledge that anger at the system feeling fucked, and they have got to make real changes to noticeably improve people’s lives. If all they do is try to maintain institutions and return to the pre-Trump status quo, then the fascists who want to set fire to everything are going to have that advantage over them.
Agreed. We should stick to the public healthcare first, and revisit others in 15-20 years.
I’m kind of surprised public healthcare hasn’t already been pitched in this way. Hell, that $50k should be a medicare credit.
15-20 years??
How about revisit in 5-8 years.
Yeah, probably. You know what’s not going to pass congress? Any of that.
Republicans and exactly enough Democrats will see to that, yes.
It would massively help the creation of small businesses, too, by massively reducing the cost/risk faced by entrepreneurs.
Nailed it.