"Small" Businesses
The Democrats say they are helping small businesses. The Republicans say the Democrats are hurting small businesses. They both can’t be right, can they?
Yes, they can. They can both be right if they mean totally different classes of businesses. What makes a business small?
- Number of employees?
- Income?
- Profit?
- Number of locations?
Is a $3 billion/year business that employs ten people small? Is a business with ten employees and an annual profit of about $1 million small? Is it still small if all the employees work in different offices? What about different companies? Is a business small if it has annual income of $10 million resulting in $500,000 annual profit which is distributed across 10 employees? Do subsidiaries or holdings count towards the size of a business?
Next time you hear a politician talk about the effect of policies on small businesses (or even the “small businesses create X% of jobs” angle), ask them for their definition of small business. We have a problem right now where people get away with opaque rhetoric on an issue where the definitions are very important.
