The public is you

Jacks

Why is it we always hear that “Big Government” strangles small business but i’ve never seen any proof of this?  By strangle do they mean making them pay taxes or putting them out of business?

i was recently reminded of our not so distant past when small towns and cities had local hardware stores, family pharmacies, small grocery stores, clothing shops, shoe shops, and electronic shops where you could get all your appliances fixed, candy and ice cream shops and i think you get the picture. Now you can hardly find one and almost every place in America has lost those businesses to the corporate behemoths that we know as Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Best Buys, K-Mart, Cost-Co, Krogers, Exxon etc.

All over the country large corporations have put small family run businesses out of business through competition, bulk buying and marketing. They have the resources to take a loss at one store and count on sales at another to balance their books until the store takes off.  Small business owners can’t do that, they can’t compete and must depend upon their customers to remain loyal and supportive. If they loose that customer base they have no other option but to close or go bankrupt.

Beach just below Point Udall

Most of those corporations i listed above make billions of dollars a year all over the world. Their influence is much more powerful than any individual business owner trying to get a break, so they use it, they use their profits to buy influence, they lobby Congress and state governments all over the nation to do their bidding, they finance think tanks to get the electorate confused and focused not on them but on government. They want you to believe that lower taxes will help your business because it’s “BIG GOVERNMENT” that is ruining small family businesses.

And you believe that right?  Was it taxes that put these small business out of business, can someone show me the proof that taxes ruined small business or was it something else? And if low taxes make more jobs why do we have record unemployment after a period of unprecedented low taxation?

I think you can answer that for yourselves.

Large corporations have been putting people out of business for a long long time but that is not all they can do.  Since the early 2000’s large financial companies have been setting up in house departments that are strictly focused on purchasing public property. That’s right, purchasing property that you the tax payer have already paid for. They will privatize the property and charge you to use it.

Cane Bay mini wetlands

All over the nation towns and cities that have finalized the process of privatization of infrastructure are realizing it wasn’t such a good deal. In Indiana where they sold off a highway in 2006 to pay their debts the reality of a 75 year lease is coming back to bite them. Tolls that had seen no price increase since 1985 doubled from $18 to $35 and will still increase every year, alternate roads can’t be improved any where near the toll road if it will affect its revenue stream, the public is responsible for paying the bill for flooding that resulted in lost revenue and the money gained from the purchase was used up in a few years. This deal constrained the public’s ability to use roads it had built fifty years before.

In Chicago the city parking meters now belong to a wealth fund based in Abu Dhabi but partnered with Morgan Stanley. Parking fees increased almost immediately, meters broke and no one fixed them but when people parked at the broken meters they got tickets from the new consortium.  The deal was done by Mayor Daley for approximately 1 billion but should, according to the actuarial reports, bring in more than 11 billion for the consortium. Bad deal for the public, great deal for the company.

Private companies will buy the assets for much less than they are worth and extract every penny of profit. If there should be a disaster that destroys the asset, the company will walk away, and the public will be left with the rubble. The assumption is made that anything run by the government is so inefficient that the private sector can run it better, make a huge profit and the public will still be better off. What a laugh!

Selling off our public assets is akin to selling off your living room furniture then renting it back so you can sit on it, where is the benefit to the public?

Taking the public out of everything in American life is driving us towards a future where only the privileged will have access. So you decide, do you still think government is ruining businesses, are you ready to auction off American public property? If not you better start speaking up cause the public is you.