Maine Taxpayer Funded High Growth Capitalism- A Letter to The Editor of The Boothbay Register

SUBMITTED AS 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 entreprership 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 tax-payers 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 is 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 was 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.

Sincerely,
Mackenzie Andersen
East Boothbay, Maine

Is this a time when there is advantage in slow growth investments?

As a small manufacturing business, we are facing an unknown future in which one of the possible outcomes is that congress will impose so many taxes, mandates expenditures and regulations that would negate available spending power of most Americans to barely cover the essentials, even as our representatives pass energy legislation that will skyrocket the costs of everyone’s electricity. Then we would have no choice but to move our production overseas, provided we can find a route to doing that.


But I am also wondering what the “high growth” entrepreneurial investors are thinking- Aren’t they also faced with having the chunks of their profits extracted to fund a rapidly expanding federal government, complete with jails to house the offending citizens who do not comply with government –mandated expenditures?

In light of the darkest potential legislation becoming a manifest reality, why isn’t there a movement to slow growth investment? - This in the hopes that the current powers that be will be eventually replaced with more business friendly powers?

A slow growth business can remain below the proposed target for tax increases on profits and defer higher growth for later years when profits are not increasingly extracted to finance an expanding federal government.

Even as Andersen Design considers the option of moving our medium priced production overseas- we hope to maintain a high end, one of a kind production studios in the United States, which might survive as a slow- growth- under- the radar enterprise until the United States finds it’s way back to it’s constitutional roots. Then- it can be poised to grow at any pace.

Just a thought from outside of the “creative economy”. We need a genuine outsiders movement- even the Tea Party movement is indifferent.