Solutions for Small Businesses

Floor Speech

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Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you very much for yielding.

I would like to spend just a couple of minutes putting this discussion in context.

I'm from Maryland. I have been there 51 years now, and for 12 years my wife and I ran a small business, meeting a payroll every Wednesday morning. That's pretty good discipline. I wanted to give you some statistics from Maryland.

Now, we're an average, a little smaller than average State. We have only eight Representatives in the Congress. We have something over 5 million people. In our little State, we have 106,441 small businesses. That is a lot of individual businesses. They have between one and 500 employees, and they totally employ 1,105,200 individuals. Now, this is in a little State like Maryland.

It's interesting to see who employs these people. The top three industries by employment:

Over 157,000 in health care and social assistance. This is one of the most rapidly growing segments of our society, which we have to kind of calm down or we won't be able to afford it;

There are over 135,000 employees in professional, scientific, and technical services. And Maryland is probably either number two or number three in biotech in the whole country, so we're proud of that;

We have 133,000 employees in construction. That's down. We used to have more than that, of course, and we hope we can have more in the future.

According to the Census Bureau, of the small businesses in Maryland, 15,717 are women-owned, and they employ 147,751 employees.

I would just like to note that, before the recent increase in employment in Hispanic small businesses, that women-owned small business are the fastest growing small businesses in our country. They are better employers than men. Men and women are different. Our military has a little trouble figuring that out sometimes, but they are different. They are ranked to be better employers by their employees, so let's give a way to women who are entering the small business community.

In addition to this, to these small businesses, in 2009, Maryland was home to 365,492 sole proprietorships. These are small businesses with one person in them, sole proprietorships.

Many of these self-employed small businesses also benefit from the 20 percent small business tax cut in H.R. 9, which is one of the things we are focusing on this evening, because I understand that we're voting on that tomorrow.

A couple of interesting statistics:

Between '05 and '08, small business created a net total of 63,576 new jobs in Maryland, but in just '08 and '09, we've lost 57,433. So we just are barely up in small business now because of how many of those small businesses we lost.

One of the previous speakers mentioned the Tax Code and how we need to make it simpler and fairer. Let's just talk about the Fair Tax for just a moment.

If we went to the Fair Tax--that's a tax on consumption--then let's repeal the 16th Amendment. Don't give the government any chance to ever come back with a personal income tax again. If we did that, we could have a bigger tax revenue with no increase in tax burden, because the tax burden today is not just the tax as you pay, but the $200 billion that it costs businesses and individuals across their country every year to comply with the code.

I don't know anybody out there who wouldn't be happy to roll that compliance cost into the tax burden so that now the revenues will go up with no increase in tax burden. That's one of the things that we need to do to balance the budget. If we just went to the Fair Tax with no increase in tax burden, we'd have $200 billion a year more money flowing into the U.S. Treasury and small business would be a big part of this.

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