Letter to the Editor of the Boothbay Register
Dear Senator Trahan and representative Bruce McDonald,
I wrote to you couple of days ago about The Small Business Growth Fund.
This fund was created in 1995 and appears to be a state government investment in private entrepreneurship for high growth companies doing "public good" (which raises the question who decides what is for the "public good"-does the taxpayer have a voice in this or just the fund managers?)
I asked what does the taxpayer get out of it? I would think that if taxpayers have invested in a private investment company that this information would be readily available and assessable to the general public but I cannot find it.
I would assume that if every dollar the taxpayer puts in were matched by nine dollars of private investment, that the taxpayer is a 10% shareholder in the company- But as I have never seen this stated, it remains only an assumption.
On the basis of that assumption, it leads to the question- why is our state government in so much debt? I saw pitches at the Juice Conference that speculated profits in the billions. If this is the sort of "high growth" that SBGF invests in, then, why haven't the taxpayers, like the good citizens of Alaska, under the governorship of Sarah Palin, received dividends in the mail?
Is it because of the even higher costs of our state entitlement programs?
Entitlements help, especially when people do not have jobs- but even slaves have entitlements. Entitlements are an investment that slave owners have to make to maintain their assets.
Where are the "opportunity" programs for the small scale and modest growth sector of the micro-economy-, which is clearly excluded from investment by the taxpayer-, funded Small Business Growth Fund?
We need a new category for the small business sector that is not classifiable as "high -growth" capitalism or non-profit organizations. This is truly the private sector micro-economy- those small businesses on "Main Street", that we heard so much about when our Federal government was selling TARP to the public. We haven't heard anything about Main Street since then but the credit freeze is still alive and well on Main Street whose primary source of capital investment is self-generated profit, which, with many small businesses filing as S-corporations, (profit reported on individual returns) will be taxed heavily if self-generated profit exceeds $250,000.00. Then the private citizen will be taxed to an increased degree in order to fund our ever-expanding federal government and to pay the interest on our federal government's rapidly escalating debt.
Where are the "opportunity programs" for the people? The United States is transforming from the land of opportunity into the land of entitlements. If there were a growth in opportunity, there would not be such a large need for entitlements. When the House was first formulating the "Stimulus Bill" they called the small business sector " the engine of new job creation" and then allocated 200 billion dollars for food stamps and $450 million for loans for small businesses, which includes the "high growth" businesses that are exclusively favored by Maine's Small Business Growth Fund. Add to that continual extensions in unemployment and a federal administration that only recently got the idea that maybe it should focus on job creation- this after months of promoting the citizens of this country to "volunteer" service. Once the citizenry is programmed to accept that they MUST volunteer service, the dots can be connected between receiving entitlements and "mandatory" volunteer service- and there you have it- the people of the United States squarely become the slaves of concentrated power and wealth.
The Small Business Growth Fund was created by our state legislature in 1995. Times have changed. Where is the Small Business growth fund for small scale and modest growth companies, which are the foundational basis of a flourishing middle class? My family business was started in 1952 with the philosophy of creating a hand made product affordable to the middle class. In those days the middle class was flourishing and the distribution of wealth took the form of a bell curve, with the greatest amount of wealth distributed among the greatest number of people.
Both sides of the political divide agree that we need to move back to a more equitable distribution of wealth- but all the solutions for doing so are targeted at funding and stimulating growth at the top. This is not working! When is someone in government going to get the revolutionary idea of stimulating growth at the bottom to middle sector of the economy? Where is the Main Street Economy Growth Fund? It is in our self-generated profits, capped at $250,000.00 before being heavily taxed to fund the hegemony of concentrated power and wealth that is the new face of government.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Thus far neither Senator Trehan not Representative McDonald have responded to my inquiry.
ReplyDeleteSince I became aware of the taxpayer's contribution to The Small Business Growth Fund, I have been researching to find further information.
In the process I learned that there are also non-profit organizations that enjoy the benefits of Maine government funding. It seems to take considerable effort to track down the actual source of this government funding, but through examinations of PDF files offered at the Maine Department of Innovation, I learned that The National Institute of Health is a source of grant funds for Maine’s technological Innovation program- which includes all kinds of large scale industries from forestry to new green energy development. The grant was issued on October 1, 2009.
Interesting to read the cluster philosophy as it is a similar philosophy that I proposed in my elevator pitch at the “Juice Conference”- but as a small scale modest growth business, we do not merit the attention of our state government and in order to become a qualifying “high growth” business, we would have to export production, which may become necessary anyway, if certain legislation gets passed in congress that will render all medium priced manufacturing in the United States unviable.
Actually the grant goes to biomedical fields so that seems appropriate- if you accept that the government should be funding high-growth capitalism and non-profit organizations through grants. As for funding high growth capitalism, I can only view this as fair if the taxpayer is a stockholder- if it is a direct grant that financially benefits private investors even if they are designated as “doing public good” by the new overlord society of Government/Non-profits/High Growth Capitalism- it is still unfair as the grant money is from taxpayers whose self generated profits are extracted to finance the ruling consortium.
ReplyDeleteI