Republicans constantly lie about taxes and small businesses

Source: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

I just heard yet another republican spouting lies about how we can't raise taxes on the wealthy, because it'll just kill small business job creation. The best data on this comes from the non-partisan group -- Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). The above link is to an excellent eight page report on this issue. Here are the key findings:

• Supporters of various tax benefits for highincome
households often claim that failure to
maintain them would have an undue effect on
many small businesses. But even assuming a
broad definition of “small business,” these
claims are very often exaggerated or false.

• Only 1.9 percent of taxpayers with smallbusiness
income face either of the top two
income tax rates -- the top rate (from 39.6
percent to 35 percent) and the next to-
top rate (from 36 percent to 33
percent). Thus, allowing the 2001
reductions in these rates to expire as
scheduled in 2010 would not affect most
small-business owners. Strengthening the
Earned Income Tax Credit could help more
than seven times as many small businesses
as extending the reductions in the top rates.

• Claims that the estate tax must be largely or
entirely eliminated to protect small businesses
are misleading as well. According to the Tax
Policy Center, in 2009 only 0.003 percent of
all estates — that is, the estates of three out of
every 100,000 people who die this year — will
be small business estates that owe any estate
tax.

• The typical small business is not a wealthy
hedge fund. Closing a lucrative tax loophole
used by hedge fund managers would have no
effect on “mom and pop” businesses.