What’s Bugging Small-Business Owners?

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Is Barack Obama’s relentless love affair with regulatory overkill choking the life out of America’s small business owners? McClatchy’s Kevin Hall decided to go out and ask them:

McClatchy reached out to owners of small businesses, many of them mom-and-pop operations, to find out whether they indeed were being choked by regulation, whether uncertainty over taxes affected their hiring plans and whether the health care overhaul was helping or hurting their business.

Their response was surprising. None of the business owners complained about regulation in their particular industries, and most seemed to welcome it…..Rip Daniels [] owns four businesses in Gulfport, Miss.: real estate ventures, a radio station and a boutique hotel/bistro. He said his problem wasn’t regulation. “Absolutely, positively not.”

….For many small businesses, their chief problem is an old one: navigating the bureaucracy of the Small Business Administration to secure government-backed loans….Other small firms say their problem is simply a lack of customers.

“I think the business climate is so shaky that I would not want to undergo any expansion or outlay capital,” said Andy Weingarten, who owns Almar Auto Repair in Charlotte. He’s thinking about hiring one more mechanic. Added Barry Grant, the regional president of Meritage Homes Corp., in California, “It starts with jobs….There’s an awful lot of people sitting on the fence; they’re waiting for a sign.”

Well, I guess these responses might be surprising if you subsist on a steady diet of Fox News and Chamber of Commerce press releases. For the rest of us, not so much. The small business owners that Hall talked to complained about the banking system, workers’ compensation, the Small Business Administration, insurance, and competition from the internet. And they talked about a lack of customers.

In other words, all the usual stuff that’s been around forever, plus a lack of demand because the economy is in lousy shape. Maybe we should consider doing something about this?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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