President Obama repeatedly touts that he has cut taxes for small business owners 18 times.

I own several small businesses. My taxes have been cut 18 times? That’s impressive. That should really help. In light of the President’s claim and his oft touted Herculean effort to help small businesses and stimulate the economy, it seems strange that I have been unable to find a single instance of my taxes being cut, let alone 18 instances.  Indeed, please forget about any new tax cuts for me.

Uncomfortable though they may be, I do not mind paying the taxes that I have been paying. What I do mind, however, is the mountain of NEW regulations that now deny me access to capital and even make punitive the spending of my own capital.  For a more detailed discussion of the real world in which I and other small business owners must now operate, please see Regulators Gone Wild and Over-Regulation is Destroying our Community Banks.  Perhaps the observations therein should have been entitled “How Regulations are Blocking Economic Recovery.” For additional specific examples of how our government is interfering with small business rather than helping, please also take the time to view http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2012/07/26/Congressmans-Anti-Big-Government-Rant-Gets-Standing-Ovation But, back to the subject at hand.  For an accomplishment to be so significant that it is mentioned in most of our President’s speeches and is claimed incessantly on the internet, these 18 tax cuts should be easy to find and identify.  They are not.

How is it possible that these tax cuts, designed to help the economy at a time when the economy needs so much help, are simply accepted as a fait accompli rather than questioned or highlighted by our news media? If they are significant, why should they be in hiding?  In search of the elusive tax cuts, designed to stimulate our economy, I finally found something other than the omnipresent claim that small business owners have had their taxes cut 18 times. From http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2012/07/19/obamas-misguided-thinking-on-tax-reform :
“In his remarks, the president pointed out that so far, he’s “cut taxes for small business owners 18 times.” What he also didn’t mention is that many of those “tax cuts” were actually short-term tax credits, some good only in 2011 and 2012.

One so-called tax cut under the Small Business Jobs Act simplifies the rules for small business deductions of cellphone bills. You get the idea. His 18 “tax cuts” are small, complicated, and temporary. The tax reform we need is big, clear, and permanent.” Perhaps the distinction is too subtle for our politicians to understand, but isn’t there a major difference between cutting taxes 18 times and having 18 separate (not to mention obscure and inconsequential) tax cuts? Should we wonder why the economy remains stagnant if the President deems these cuts of significant impact to even merit mentioning?

As a small business owner, I don’t need government “help” through fleeting and miniscule changes in the tax code. I don’t need mythical tax cuts. I need repeal of the mountain of oppressive NEW regulations that make setting on the sidelines my only intelligent option. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, as misleading in name as is the President’s claim to cutting taxes for small business owners 18 times, would be an excellent place to start.

***Gary A. Howie MSc, PhD*** is a business owner/rancher