Vice President Kamala Harris will propose a tax deduction of up to $50,000 for new small businesses on Wednesday, a tenfold increase over existing relief and her latest economic policy aimed at winning over middle-class Americans after jumping into the presidential race over a month ago.
Having more small businesses is how you get less corporations and a healthier middle class… there’s a ton of great incentives for small businesses already, but the hardest part is the initialization and the first year. This makes that way easier. This is a good idea, you just have a bad view.
Except when the corporations just buy the small business. This is the big problem with breaking into an industry. If you do find a way to break in, then one of the larger guys will just buy you out or force you out. Facebook bought Insta for the sole reason to reduce competition. Meta bought them out at $1B, which was huge for a small business buyout. Post-Meta, Insta is now estimated to be worth $100B Literally a penny on the dollar for the buyout. Meta also bought out WhatsApp at $19B, currently estimated to be $109B worth today. Like things that are regular names at this point were once small businesses that were serious threats to larger companies. Meta’s Messenger was under serious threat by WhatsApp prior to the buy out.
And sometimes the point is to just get rid of the business altogether. Microsoft bought out Wunderlist for the sole reason to kill off the app. Google bought out Waze and has constantly been keeping them just functioning, but in 2020 the FTC launched yet another investigation into Google over Waze.
Small businesses won’t thrive without restricting some of the anti-competitive behavior of the larger corporations.
Those companies were all worth millions by that point. I completely agree about splitting monopolies, but y’all are willing to sacrifice the common man (the people you’re closest to in class) simply because maybe, possibly, potentially they could be bought out by a major monopoly rather than the real helpful to the middle/lower class which is helping them get started and building their own wealth.
No, you have a point and I wrote that oddly. I’m not saying we can only have one or the other. But yeah, my comment makes it sound like we can’t do helping small businesses without first taking care of large corporations. We can have both things happening.
That’s on me, I wasn’t entirely clear in that comment. We can have the small business help and that would provide benefit to small businesses. But small businesses won’t thrive until we ease up the grip that particular companies have on select industries.
I appreciate you recognizing that it was worded wrong, or how someone could interpret it that way.
My problem with the original comment I replied to was more this idea that we should be breaking down big businesses (which we should) rather than focusing our efforts on building up small businesses. My wife and I have talked about opening up a book store (I don’t read, but my wife does and she’s passionate about it [200 books a year on average!]) and going from 10 to 50,000 first year support would make that leap from our comfortable finance management position for her to being a business owner. So for me I see how this personally impacts the every man and how it benefits us (and me) as a whole. Plus, as is often the case, people get so caught up in the details of things these days that we end up taking more time and spending more money/energy in the first place.
Thank you. I can’t believe there are multiple comments in this thread hating on small businesses and somehow justifying that as them being anti-corpo/wealthy elite. We need less Walmart/Amazon/etc and more smaller, locally owned and run businesses.
Even better just require all businesses to have a union or coop democratic structure when expanded beyond one employee. Fix the problem from the beginning. All employees should have equal voice. CEO one vote, delivery truck driver one vote. For all companies large and small.
You and @Rookwood@lemmy.world are both right.
On one side, helping small business get started is good.
The other side, breaking up monopolies and market manipulators is also needed.
The default for acquisitions should be no. Too many large companies buying small companies.