If you really want to help small business, let top bracket tax cuts expire

The high-end tax cuts are not good for our more than 500,000 members or small businesses generally. They don’t help create jobs. They are contributing to America’s financial ruin – not our economic success. They should expire as scheduled on December 31.

Behind the political rhetoric about tax cuts creating jobs and tax hikes killing them is this reality reported by the Wall Street Journal: President Bush “shows the worst track record for job creation since the government began keeping records.” That’s all the way back to 1939.

The economy created just 1.1 million jobs net under the policies of the Bush Administration, while creating 22.7 million jobs under the Clinton Administration. Employment grew 16.2 percent in the six years after Clinton’s 1993 tax increase. Employment grew just 4.8 percent in the six years between Bush’s 2001 tax cut and the Great Recession. The 2001-2007 economic expansion was the weakest since World War II.

The Bush administration inherited a large budget surplus and left behind a giant budget deficit, crumbling infrastructure and the worse economic meltdown since the Great Depression. We need to change course. Not double down.

We hear every day from our members – small business owners and entrepreneurs all around the country – who are fighting to hold on and build their businesses and our economy, despite a consumer base still reeling from unemployment and foreclosures, despite banks who are still starving them of capital, and despite a Congress and administration who just don’t get it.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, “In 2009, nearly one in four people (including children) lived in a family in which at least one family member was unemployed at some time during the year.” Also according to the CBO, extending unemployment insurance has the greatest bang for the buck in increased job creation and economic growth. Personal income tax cuts have the least.

Any member of Congress who opposes extending unemployment insurance while insisting on more tax cuts for the richest 2 percent of Americans is showing lack of common sense and common decency. Their constituency is Wall Street, not Main Street.

Only 3 percent of taxpayers who report any business income – let alone income from a true small business – earn enough to be impacted by the top tax brackets. Real small business owners know that you don’t use personal income tax savings to hire workers — you deduct the costs of hiring and other business expenses from your taxes.

Wealthy lobbyists, politicians, hedge fund managers and big business CEOs should stop hiding behind small business to push policies that line their pockets while hurting small businesses and hurting America.

We don’t need more tax cuts at the top. The richest 1 percent of Americans have more than a fifth of our national income – a larger share than any time since 1928, just before the Great Depression. With more and more money concentrated with fewer and fewer politically influential high rollers, less and less money is flowing into and through the hands of the mainstream American consumer.

We don’t need more tax cuts at the top. We need more broad-based consumer income and spending at the bottom and the middle.

It would be madness to borrow another $700 billion dollars over the next decade to cover tax cuts for the best-off Americans. We need the $700 billion in revenue gained from restoring the top bracket tax rates to Clinton-era levels. We need to invest it in real job creation and small business growth, and rebuilding the infrastructure that underpins our economy.

America’s small businesses need Congress and President Obama to fight for our future as hard as my members are fighting every day.

Margot Dorfman is the CEO of the U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce.