If that were the greatest barrier, wouldn't nations with universal health care see higher rates of entrepreneurship? I don't have numbers, but at least anecdotally it doesn't seem to be the case. Is the U.K. startup culture particularly impressive?
This is an excellent point and a powerful pro-market, entrepreneurial argument that's pro-small business. When you're a business of one, or even a small handful of people, private insurance is painful and costly. And wouldn't that essential operating expense be better spent expanding the business?
I wouldn't call it the greatest barrier, but it's probably at least top-three. Lack of access to capital and lack of societal safety net to mitigate failure risk would be my personal #1 and #2.
This is interesting but I've always thought we should do it in such a way where someone could take say $100K out of their 401K to start up a business. This money is sitting right now and doesn't help grow the economy.
The company would be eligible for tax credits if the company fails at a lower rate and spread across five years. So say you and a partner start a company and document the percentage of this money that is spent on taxable wages. The company fails and you apply for the "startup tax credit" for future earnings. You would be able to get a $10K deduction per year for five years on your federal taxes if you put this back into your 401K. This means that you get half your money back. Your deduction can't be higher than the federal tax you owe in any of these years.
You get to try starting a company with less risk. The government will likely get lots of taxes that may actually be in excess of the up to $50K they gave you in credits since this $100K is being spent and taxed and reallocated many times over. I don't have this idea fully fleshed out but that is the gist anyway.
This is just EITC expansion / very low "basic income". There's nothing about "for startups" here, except that "poor founders on ramen noodles would benefit". Note also that "start-up" in the original study means "firms [less than a year old]".
For me the question is who CREATES jobs. Startups create jobs, big corporations acquire then shed jobs.
As a multi-startup founder, I think the earned income tax credit is brilliant. That along with a universal healthcare system would allow millions of people to take a greater risk in creating new companies.
The EITC is awesome. It is well established from many policy organizations as the most effective anti poverty (for current AND future generations) program we have today. It was wildly popular in conservative circles even.
But somehow the success of it is never built on. It baffles me.
This article is not proposing a tax credit for startup workers at all. It's proposing a tax credit for everyone. It tries to make the case that this would be good for startup companies. But the proposed tax credit is NOT confined to workers at startups, at least that's the way the article reads. It says so right in the first paragraph: "a giant negative income tax for the average American." Average Americans do not work at startups.
Instead of this tax credit for the already-middle-class, why not raise the standard of living in poor areas by investing in education, food security, health care and jobs in those areas? If it works, you raise the poor up to the middle class, reduce dependence on government subsidies, and grow the economy.
Let's say you start a business in a poor neighborhood. If you hire locals you're by default investing in the local community and the local economy can grow. If you hire outsiders, they can come into the city and help new services start that will serve the needs of the workers, which will provide a limited impact on the local economy.
If you provide assistance for education/job training, food assistance, daycare and healthcare, the local community can gain the advantages they need to get jobs. But if the jobs aren't local, they usually need major investments in public transit, so IMHO it's better to invest in local small businesses in these areas.
So perhaps this $6,000 credit isn't a bad idea, but spend it where it really counts: poor cities and neighborhoods whose local economy could use it the most.
How do you decide which neighborhoods qualify, and which don't? Just offering a tax credit isn't going to convince many people to start a business in a poor neighborhood anyway; usually, people avoid them because they don't want to work in a poor neighborhood every day, and because they worry about their safety. So are you going to have the government create businesses there?
Also, what about poor rural people? It doesn't make any sense to start businesses there, because the population density is too low (and again, how do you convince people to start businesses in economically unviable areas?). The ruralites need to move to where the jobs are, but they don't want to do that.
Instead of calling it a corporate tax cut I would prefer to state it as equalization among competing jurisdictions. Meaning, even Canada runs a 15% tax rate and brings in more by percentage of GDP than the US does with a 35% rate.
Its pretty dishonest in linking new jobs as the metric to make startups look better than corporations when its always been small business which employs the most and works through more people than start ups.
Plus the idea of lowering the tax rate is to give the big players a reason to bring the money back here instead of sitting overseas.
We did it before and the treasury benefited, other countries have done it as well; see Canada which went to 15%. So please tell me how we justify more than twice that rate????
exactly.. The point of a startup is to utilize technologies so that they can run more efficiently than big corporations, thus giving them a competitive advantage and an economical one as well.
More specifically, we normally think of startups as businesses where you can do the work once and then sell it multiple times, while in a normal small business or consulting shop, you have to do the work for each customer. There's a pretty big grey area - enterprise software companies often need a significant amount of customization for each customer, while with the sharing/gig economy, whether you can "do the work once and sell it multiple times" depends on whether you consider "the work" to be the service the customer is paying for or the service of connecting an independent contractor to potential customers. But it seems to work pretty well as a functional definition.
Part of my job is telling clients to abandon the startup mentality. When you have 100 employees, two buildings and a defense contract, you can no longer play fast with regulations. That rep from the japanese air force (hypo) wont forgive a lack of compliance paperwork because you needed room for an arcade.
Lower the taxes and don't let government get their hands on it at any stage of the process. This smacks again of redistribution of wealth and I'm totally against this.
> Lower the taxes and don't let government get their hands on it at any stage of the process. This smacks again of redistribution of wealth and I'm totally against this.
Brilliant! I'm sure that startups will flourish in an environment where there is no functioning government. What I don't understand is why the movie Mad Max didn't show a vibrant startup community with flowing rivers of lattes and soylent, rather than the human misery that comes from the absence of rule of law, retirement, and health care.
Serious question, do you really want to live in a world devoid of "redistribution of wealth", where life is cheap, the working class is treated like disposable trash, and treatable illnesses are a death sentence?
What would it take to convince you that the wealthy contributing some of their riches back to society is the foundation for a functioning civilization?
I still think $6000 is a large amount in some sense for someone just getting started.
I would much rather see this along with a flat tax. The recent discussion on here about USFacts.org highlighted that revenue was growing in proportion to population. What someone had said is that it makes the case for a much simpler tax system. We spend 6 billion man hours a year on taxes in the US. Is that really the best use of our time?
There has never really been a compelling scheme for a flat tax that solves the problem inherent to it -- that a flat tax hurts those with a lower ability-to-pay.
Flat tax is a horrible libertarian idea that simply hurts lower-income people, because to get the same revenue you end up having to massively raise the taxes on the lower classes, which they can't afford since they're already struggling to make ends meet. We've had progressive taxation in this country since the invention of income tax, for good reason. If you want simpler taxes, you don't need a flat tax, you just need to eliminate all the deductions and credits. Calculating a progressive tax is not hard: you just see which bracket your income falls into, and then do the simple calculation. Or, you just look it up in a table which most people do.
[+] [-] specialist|9 years ago|reply
Especially for parents (and wannabe parents).
[+] [-] twoodfin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mancerayder|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryandrake|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shimon_e|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbhl|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Research_and_Experi...
The one caveat is that you have to spend money (and keep good books) in order to be eligible for the tax credit.
[+] [-] snarf21|9 years ago|reply
The company would be eligible for tax credits if the company fails at a lower rate and spread across five years. So say you and a partner start a company and document the percentage of this money that is spent on taxable wages. The company fails and you apply for the "startup tax credit" for future earnings. You would be able to get a $10K deduction per year for five years on your federal taxes if you put this back into your 401K. This means that you get half your money back. Your deduction can't be higher than the federal tax you owe in any of these years.
You get to try starting a company with less risk. The government will likely get lots of taxes that may actually be in excess of the up to $50K they gave you in credits since this $100K is being spent and taxed and reallocated many times over. I don't have this idea fully fleshed out but that is the gist anyway.
[+] [-] basseq|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BatFastard|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BatFastard|9 years ago|reply
As a multi-startup founder, I think the earned income tax credit is brilliant. That along with a universal healthcare system would allow millions of people to take a greater risk in creating new companies.
[+] [-] jnordwick|9 years ago|reply
But somehow the success of it is never built on. It baffles me.
[+] [-] kratak|9 years ago|reply
This article is not proposing a tax credit for startup workers at all. It's proposing a tax credit for everyone. It tries to make the case that this would be good for startup companies. But the proposed tax credit is NOT confined to workers at startups, at least that's the way the article reads. It says so right in the first paragraph: "a giant negative income tax for the average American." Average Americans do not work at startups.
[+] [-] peterwwillis|9 years ago|reply
Let's say you start a business in a poor neighborhood. If you hire locals you're by default investing in the local community and the local economy can grow. If you hire outsiders, they can come into the city and help new services start that will serve the needs of the workers, which will provide a limited impact on the local economy.
If you provide assistance for education/job training, food assistance, daycare and healthcare, the local community can gain the advantages they need to get jobs. But if the jobs aren't local, they usually need major investments in public transit, so IMHO it's better to invest in local small businesses in these areas.
So perhaps this $6,000 credit isn't a bad idea, but spend it where it really counts: poor cities and neighborhoods whose local economy could use it the most.
[+] [-] kratak|9 years ago|reply
Also, what about poor rural people? It doesn't make any sense to start businesses there, because the population density is too low (and again, how do you convince people to start businesses in economically unviable areas?). The ruralites need to move to where the jobs are, but they don't want to do that.
[+] [-] Shivetya|9 years ago|reply
Its pretty dishonest in linking new jobs as the metric to make startups look better than corporations when its always been small business which employs the most and works through more people than start ups.
Plus the idea of lowering the tax rate is to give the big players a reason to bring the money back here instead of sitting overseas.
We did it before and the treasury benefited, other countries have done it as well; see Canada which went to 15%. So please tell me how we justify more than twice that rate????
[+] [-] Danihan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dev1n|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmgutz|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nostrademons|9 years ago|reply
More specifically, we normally think of startups as businesses where you can do the work once and then sell it multiple times, while in a normal small business or consulting shop, you have to do the work for each customer. There's a pretty big grey area - enterprise software companies often need a significant amount of customization for each customer, while with the sharing/gig economy, whether you can "do the work once and sell it multiple times" depends on whether you consider "the work" to be the service the customer is paying for or the service of connecting an independent contractor to potential customers. But it seems to work pretty well as a functional definition.
[+] [-] sandworm101|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wtvanhest|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnordwick|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idlewords|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bnolsen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] random28345|9 years ago|reply
Brilliant! I'm sure that startups will flourish in an environment where there is no functioning government. What I don't understand is why the movie Mad Max didn't show a vibrant startup community with flowing rivers of lattes and soylent, rather than the human misery that comes from the absence of rule of law, retirement, and health care.
Serious question, do you really want to live in a world devoid of "redistribution of wealth", where life is cheap, the working class is treated like disposable trash, and treatable illnesses are a death sentence?
What would it take to convince you that the wealthy contributing some of their riches back to society is the foundation for a functioning civilization?
[+] [-] s73ver|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] muninn_|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmaly|9 years ago|reply
I would much rather see this along with a flat tax. The recent discussion on here about USFacts.org highlighted that revenue was growing in proportion to population. What someone had said is that it makes the case for a much simpler tax system. We spend 6 billion man hours a year on taxes in the US. Is that really the best use of our time?
[+] [-] stiva|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kratak|9 years ago|reply