What my small businessman father knows about the GOP (and the Democrats)
My whole life, I’ve heard my father complain about dwindling government support for small businesses. He firmly believed that the Republican party had his back. They are the party that supposedly cares about small business owners doing their best to thrive in an unstable economy.
Any conservative parent with a less-than-conservative child understands what our dinners looked like — me, pointing out that trickle- down economics failed, him pointing out that Democrats ignoring business owners and favoring identity politics has benefited no one.
But these days, even my Reagan-loving father has noted how little the GOP actually cares about people like him.
His distrust of the GOP began with their take on single-payer healthcare. Like him, I’ve never understood why single-payer healthcare was a talking point of the Left. Small business owners do not want to deal with their employees’ insurance needs. They don’t want to have to try to balance necessary business decisions with their employees’ health. It’s ridiculous, for everyone involved, that healthcare is tied to employment in this country.
Over half of employers have decreased the costs of providing health care, according to the Better Business Bureau, with most reducing benefits or shifting more of the cost onto employees. The current system benefits no one except the insurance companies and hospitals that overcharge and remain mostly unchecked, thanks to generous political donations to both parties.
If people like my father did not have to worry about covering their workers’ healthcare, they’d have more funds to re-invest in growing their companies, they’d be able to hire more people full time, and they’d be relieved of having to worry about the intersection of their morals and pocketbooks.
The GOP should have embraced a single-payer solution, despite the increase in government spending, as it’s one of the biggest things they can do to truly support small businesses and their workers. Forcing entrepreneurs to become experts on healthcare makes no sense. They should be focusing on producing goods and services people need and on driving innovation.
My dad would prefer to stay out of his employee’s health decisions. But his complaints don’t stop there. The GOP continues to enact financial policies that hurt small businesses like my father’s too. Corporate tax rates, designed to benefit huge corporations, effectively ignore S corporations and LLCs to increase their relative individual tax burden.
According to Pew, most Republicans are as suspicious of large banks and corporations as Democrats. Small businesses remain popular (eight in ten people prefer to support local businesses, for example), but support for large corporations is falling.
GOP leadership, though, tells a different story. By focusing on opposing regulations, which mostly hurt large corporations, Republicans have been hurting people
like my dad. Regulations are not even in the top-ten issues most small business owners care about — yet, by focusing the discussion on dangers of deregulation, the GOP has kept their corporate donor base happy.
Large, multinational corporations have failed small-town America, putting corporate profits over long-term investment in a community. Local businesses become ingrained into the fabric of a city. The distance between large and small businesses grows each day: Large corporations are winning bigger profit margins even as cities and towns lose the small businesses that defined them.
My dad is not a Democrat. He doesn’t believe in progressive politics, nor is he a big fan of any Democratic politicians. But he knows the Republicans have left people like him behind. He’s not wrong to think that both parties have let him down and seem more focused on fighting about LGBTQ+ issues than on helping small businesses weather an uncertain economy.
He tells me on the phone that he’s not quite sure who to vote for. He’s worried about the GOP infringing on business’s First Amendment rights (see Florida’s
removing the Miami Hyatt’s liquor license for hosting a “Drag Queen Christmas”), just like he used to be worried about Democrats pushing woke values onto small businesses. He firmly believes that as long as businesses aren’t breaking the law, they should pretty much be left to their own devices. I don’t disagree.
My father wants to not worry about his employees’ health costs. He wants tax breaks for individuals with pass-through tax burdens. He wants to live in a country that supports entrepreneurs and local business-folk as much as it supports big corporations.
My dad doesn’t care what events are held at any given hotel. He doesn’t care about anything except working hard so his small business can see another day, so he can give people jobs, serve his customers, and support his family. As long as they obey the law, and don’t hurt anyone else, other people can do what they think best.
And neither party helps him do that.