[unixfox]

#1 Taxes: The IRS seems to especially enjoy tormenting entrepreneurs and small businesses.

If millions of small businesses decided to stop withholding the government would have a sh!t fit.

Starve the beast.

[jonose]

May top three would be:
1. Lack of available start up and operating credit
2. Unemployment Insurance costs
3. Workers Compensation Insurance costs

[Mr. Jeeves]

The IRS seems to especially enjoy tormenting entrepreneurs and small businesses.

I don't think the agents do it for fun - they have been ordered to do it. Their whole tone and approach toward small business has changed drastically since January, 2009.

[no-to-illegals]

Have heard from one person who said business was thriving and increasing monthly. This person is in the repo business.

[SkyPilot]

This is obscene. God help us all.

[Pontiac]

Our politicians know that their careers depend on raising money, so they tend to be very good to those that they get big money from. There is a reason why big corporations spend billions of dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying. They do it because it works. Over the decades, the big corporations have been able to shift the rules of the game massively in their favor, and this has been to the detriment of entrepreneurs and small businesses.

Your Low Information Voter will never understand how Campaign Finance Laws have been engineered against the small business owner and in favor the wealthy big business types.

Fifty or sixty years ago a political challenger could find a single or a few wealthy contributors to finance their campaign if the challenger could convince that person that they had the right stuff.

Then along comes campaign finance reformer suspicious of the rich insiders that had the money to buy influence with politicians. So they get congress to pass campaign contribution limits so that no single person could contribute enough money to buy a politician.

Well along comes the law of unintended consequence to spoil all of their plans. The reformers of course did not take in to account the resourcefulness of politicians looking to keep their jobs and get one up on the competition or the rich to buy a favor from a willing politician. They together came up with what is known as bundling. Bundling is where a large number of individuals get together to put all of their political contributions to a politician in one “bundle” to essentially make one large contribution and there by gain the attention of the politician for their special interest.

But when you talk business what size of business has the best shot at getting a BIG bundle of money. Well of course it is a BIG business. A large corporation has a lot of employees they can reach out to and persued to write a check. Most if not all large companies have formed Political Action Committees to do just that.

Campaign Finance Reform has multiplied the influence of big business on politics instead of limiting that influence. As usual when politician say they are trying to give the little man a fair shake they are of course in reality serving their own interest. Campaign Finance Reform from the beginning was designed to keep incumbents in office and make it difficult for a challenger to get the necessary campaign contributions to run a competitive race against a seated incumbent.

[Windflier]

"...isn't that what we pound into the heads of our children these days? We teach them to work hard in school so that they can "get a good job" when they grow up. From a very early age we train our children to plug themselves into the system."

I had that mantra pounded into my head my whole childhood. I bucked my parents and grandparents and went straight into the work force after high school, giving college a pass.

Over the next two decades, I worked my way up in several small construction businesses, then struck out on my own. Fifteen years later, I'm still a free man running my own business. I may not have a fat government pension waiting for me at retirement, but I have my freedom. I wouldn't have it any other way.