By Felix Haynes | Publisher
A high percentage of Plant City’s businesses are small businesses, started by one or more entrepreneurs and providing jobs to their fellow citizens.
President Barack Obama recently called into question who should get the credit for all our small businesses.
“If you own a business, you didn’t do that,” he said. “Someone else did that. Someone else built the roads your trucks drive on. A teacher taught all your employees.”
Whether intended or not, Obama’s remarks landed in the middle of a political fault line. No doubt, many liberals believe what the president said. Conservatives, on the other hand, and particularly conservatives who own their own businesses, disagree vehemently.
A recent Rasmussen poll of these questions sheds light on how Americans feel about this disagreement. Rasmussen found that 72% of Americans believe entrepreneurs should get most of the credit for their business, and 77% of Americans believe business owners work harder than the rest of us.
There are certainly some similarities between an employee and a business owner. Both likely received a public-school education at taxpayer expense. Both drive on roads paid by the taxpayers. Both enjoy services provided by the government, starting with national defense and local police protection.
Entrepreneurs and employees receive those benefits equally, and both pay taxes to support them. Some entrepreneurs, whose businesses make a profit, carry a tax burden higher than those of many employees.
There, the similarities end.
Every business owner had to come up with an idea for a new product or service for his business to be successful. Every business owner has to find the capital to initially fund the business. Whether it is harder to find an “angel” willing to fund the business or for the businessperson to draw upon his or her own savings or take out a second mortgage on his or her home can be debated. Not only are these steps difficult, but also they are things a regular employee never has to do.
Every business owner has to go through the steps necessary to stand the business up, starting with how the business will be organized and developing the all-important business plan. Implementing the plan involves making many more decisions — creating jobs and hiring people to fill those jobs.
Yes, it’s nice to have the sole power to make these decisions, but with that power comes the ultimate accountability.
All these characteristics of ownership involve a vital concept that employees do not have to incur — risk. Employees have the luxury of not having to carry the risk of maintaining and building the business. Yes, if the business fails, the employee will be out of a job, but to the nine-to-five worker, that risk is a distant thing. For the business owner, it is a bear to wrestle every day.
Many employed in the public and private sectors describe responsibility this way: “I like it that when I leave work at the end of the day, I can turn it off until the next morning. I don’t worry about my job until the next day, and I can sleep like a baby at night.”
Business owners do not have this luxury. They carry their leadership responsibilities on their shoulders constantly. Perhaps the most important result of all these ownership responsibilities is that the business provides jobs. For most Americans, 72% according to Rasmussen, business owners should get credit.
They should not have their assumption of risk and creation of jobs for the rest of us denigrated or minimized.
For our economy to work, it is necessary to find more of us who are willing to start our own businesses. If we make the assumption of risk and the creation of jobs so unattractive and unheralded that few want to carry those responsibilities, we will continue to be mired in 8.2% unemployment nationally and nearly 10% statewide.
And that is not in anyone’s best interest.“>http://familylawadvocate.com/mgnovennie-zaymi-deneg-v-den-obrasheniya.php