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Kim: Supporting Small Businesses Across the Nation
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the Subcommittee on Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Workforce Development is holding a hybrid hearing titled, "Wealth for the Working Class: The Clean Energy Economy."
Subcommittee Ranking Member Young Kim's opening statement as prepared for delivery:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this hearing.
Prior to the pandemic and under the previous Administration’s pro-growth and deregulatory agenda, an extraordinary 160 million Americans were employed, and the unemployment rate fell to a 50-year low. Additionally, wages for rank-and-file workers and nonsupervisory employees were rising faster than the wages for managers or supervisors.
Now, 3.2 million Americans are unemployed all while small businesses place “help wanted” signs on their storefronts and struggle to find the labor force to meet heightened demand.
As we safely reopen our communities and transition to recovery, I hope we can continue to work together to help small businesses stay afloat while also supporting American workers. Despite the tremendous amount of financial relief flowing to small businesses, many continue to endure a challenging recovery.
Since January of this year, inflation has increased every single month and is climbing at the fastest rate in 13 years. We cannot continue the current path of reckless spending, which in turn, is becoming a tax on America’s workers, middle-class families, and small businesses. In May, roughly half of small businesses, 48 percent, were forced to raise their prices, the largest percentage reported in 40 years. Small businesses and workers are particularly vulnerable to changes in the price of fuel, food, and materials, and now they are simultaneously experiencing a decreased worth of their paychecks.
To pay for this Administration’s spending plans, the President has proposed various tax increases that will impact small businesses and workers. Within the American Jobs Plan, which focuses on items including the Green New Deal’s climate change initiatives, the President is proposing to pay for the spending by increasing the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent. This will impact over one million small businesses organized as C corporations. I think it's worth noting that 55 percent of subchapter C corporations have five or fewer employees and 85 percent have fewer than 20 employees.
Among the outsized effects, a corporate tax increase will directly cause utility costs to surge across the country, and as a result, small businesses will face higher electric, gas, and water bills.
The Biden administration has paired government spending with government regulations that further hinder America’s small business recovery. The cost of regulatory compliance is disproportionally burdensome for small businesses who operate on thin margins with less staff and tight budgets. We should empower small businesses to innovate, not add the additional cost of regulatory compliance to their balance sheet.
I believe we can return to the booming economy we had before the pandemic, but any efforts to increase regulations and impose additional requirements on small businesses will further hinder recovery and jeopardize the state of our nation’s smallest firms.
Small businesses have the flexibility, the agility, and the creativity to overcome anything, but we need to allow them to do that by continuing to provide pro-growth, pro-business policies.
I look forward to hearing from our witnesses today on how we can support them and workers across the nation.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Subcommittee Ranking Member Young Kim's opening statement as prepared for delivery:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this hearing.
Prior to the pandemic and under the previous Administration’s pro-growth and deregulatory agenda, an extraordinary 160 million Americans were employed, and the unemployment rate fell to a 50-year low. Additionally, wages for rank-and-file workers and nonsupervisory employees were rising faster than the wages for managers or supervisors.
Now, 3.2 million Americans are unemployed all while small businesses place “help wanted” signs on their storefronts and struggle to find the labor force to meet heightened demand.
As we safely reopen our communities and transition to recovery, I hope we can continue to work together to help small businesses stay afloat while also supporting American workers. Despite the tremendous amount of financial relief flowing to small businesses, many continue to endure a challenging recovery.
Since January of this year, inflation has increased every single month and is climbing at the fastest rate in 13 years. We cannot continue the current path of reckless spending, which in turn, is becoming a tax on America’s workers, middle-class families, and small businesses. In May, roughly half of small businesses, 48 percent, were forced to raise their prices, the largest percentage reported in 40 years. Small businesses and workers are particularly vulnerable to changes in the price of fuel, food, and materials, and now they are simultaneously experiencing a decreased worth of their paychecks.
To pay for this Administration’s spending plans, the President has proposed various tax increases that will impact small businesses and workers. Within the American Jobs Plan, which focuses on items including the Green New Deal’s climate change initiatives, the President is proposing to pay for the spending by increasing the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent. This will impact over one million small businesses organized as C corporations. I think it's worth noting that 55 percent of subchapter C corporations have five or fewer employees and 85 percent have fewer than 20 employees.
Among the outsized effects, a corporate tax increase will directly cause utility costs to surge across the country, and as a result, small businesses will face higher electric, gas, and water bills.
The Biden administration has paired government spending with government regulations that further hinder America’s small business recovery. The cost of regulatory compliance is disproportionally burdensome for small businesses who operate on thin margins with less staff and tight budgets. We should empower small businesses to innovate, not add the additional cost of regulatory compliance to their balance sheet.
I believe we can return to the booming economy we had before the pandemic, but any efforts to increase regulations and impose additional requirements on small businesses will further hinder recovery and jeopardize the state of our nation’s smallest firms.
Small businesses have the flexibility, the agility, and the creativity to overcome anything, but we need to allow them to do that by continuing to provide pro-growth, pro-business policies.
I look forward to hearing from our witnesses today on how we can support them and workers across the nation.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
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