Like a football team, small businesses can win when they’re optimistic. Optimism gives them the courage and confidence to take risks. But instead of cheering them on, the president’s administration keeps them uncertain and off balance with plots to ease workplace unionization, or silly decrees preventing them from adequately screening potential employees.
America’s entrepreneurs would respond to some encouragement from President Obama, but when he poisons their hopes and dreams with the dangerous language of class warfare, they lose heart.
When he expresses his belief that small businesses and big corporations are one and the same and should be taxed alike, Main Street owners are bewildered. They, who operate from single storefronts and delivery vans, pay taxes as individuals and plow their earnings back into their businesses to keep them afloat, hear little incentive to grow and create new jobs.
Now into the fourth quarter of his administration, President Obama should be signaling plays to Main Street that will ignite a recovery. Small businesses fear a government that relies on risky Hail Mary stimulus spending or quarterback-sneak deficit-reduction tricks. But they can be motivated by leadership in Washington that refuses to spend money it doesn’t have, cuts strangulating red tape, and converts its army of booing bureaucrats into cheerleaders for entrepreneurship.
The clock is running out. Small-business owners have grown weary of waiting for the president to provide a real plan to help bring customers through their doors. Without such a plan and true action to make it happen, America will lose another year of job creation, profitability and productivity we cannot afford.
Unless the president soon realizes the true value of those millions of small firms that constitute the backbone of the United States and reverses his administration’s faulty game plan, the uncertainty that is plaguing entrepreneurs will completely undermine their optimism and ensure further economic loss.
Whether President Obama pulls for the Giants or the Pats on February 5, he should pay closer attention to the coaches on the sidelines than what happens on the field. Coaches Bill Belichick and Tom Coughlin are winners. They know how to call plays, build confidence and lead their teams to victory.
Small business built America, can rebuild it and keep it strong. All Washington needs to do is follow Main Street’s example and understand a simple fact: Free enterprise is not free.
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