Kaine focuses on small businesses

lakewood» One blamed government regulations for costing them money. Another said cheap foreign labor is making it hard to remain competitive. And two others bemoaned the difficulty in finding loans to grow their businesses.

The owners of Colorado companies gave the vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine an earful Tuesday at a campaign event in Lakewood. And Kaine promised to take action as he outlined the Democratic ticket’s five-point plan to boost small businesses.

“The American economy really isn’t best measured by what’s going on on Wall Street. It’s best measured by what’s happening with small businesses,” he told a private audience at Primus Aerospace, a manufacturing company that hosted the event.

He continued: “If you want there to be more jobs, if you want there to be higher wages, if you want there to be innovation and entrepreneurship, it’s the small businesses and the startups that are going to make that happen.”

The plan — outlined earlier in the day by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton — is designed to put an emphasis on the economy, a top issue in the race, even in Colorado, where the unemployment rate ranks near the bottom in the nation.

To make it easier to start small businesses, Kaine said, Clinton wants to reduce taxes and make it easier to file tax forms through the creation of a standard corporate deduction. As other elements of the plan do, the proposal lacked many specifics, particularly the amount of the deduction.

In other areas, Clinton wants to provide financial incentives to states and local governments to streamline the regulatory process, make it easier for community banks to provide loans, expand a tax credit to encourage small businesses to provide health care to employees, ensure the federal government is more responsive and fight predatory behavior by large companies.

The assurances did little to quell the concerns of the business leaders. Susan Brown, the owner of a landscape architecture company and a Clinton supporter, said she can’t find qualified people to fill open positions and asked for help. “What’s important to me is we get programs that people understand that we have jobs,” she said.

Richard Lewis runs a company that contracts with the federal government, and he said he lost business in the 2013 shutdown, a move precipitated by Republican lawmakers. He told Kaine that “one of best things you can do is … get Congress to work together.”