NORTH HAMPTON During a visit to New Hampshire’s Seacoast last week, Vice President Kamala Harris communicated proposals to support the development of small businesses, prompting hopeful optimism among business owners and politicians.
In her address at Throwback Brewery on Sept. 4, Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, told a large crowd of supporters she’d propose policies to incentivize entrepreneurs to develop businesses, in New Hampshire and across the country, according to a fact sheet provided by the campaign.
Harris’ policy proposal included setting a goal of 25 million new small business applications over the next four years, expanding the startup expense deduction from $5,000 to $50,000 and making bureaucratic changes to reduce red tape required for businesses to file taxes and suggested removing excessive occupational licensing requirements.
Business owners expressed principal enthusiasm for the tenfold increase in startup expense deductions. Starting a business can be exceedingly expensive, and Emmett Soldati, who owns Teetotaller cafes in Dover and Concord and is running for Executive Council in District 1, said the bump in startup capital could be the difference between new enterprises failing and surviving.
The startup expense deduction, according to Harris’ proposal, could be used by a new business owner immediately upon opening up shop, or in a future year to reduce their tax burden at the point when they first turn a profit.
“I like it a lot,” Soldati said. “When I got started, and this is true of many entrepreneurs, you don’t necessarily know what you’re getting into, financially. You don’t know how much things cost you have a dream, you have an idea. Once you get started, you go to the school of hard knocks.”
Small businesses employ half of all workers in the United States, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration, and have created 70% of all new jobs since 2019, the U.S. Department of the Treasury reported.
Drawing from new and existing federal, state and local programs, Harris proposed to fund a network of business incubators and “innovation hubs” to assist small businesses in taking advantage of investments in semiconductor factories and other high tech and big-money ventures. Those incubators would help business owners access technical assistance, capital and customers. Hubs would help connect manufacturers with contracts to clients, national laboratories, research facilities, technical assistance and funding opportunities.
The plan would also make permanent existing $800-per-year tax credits available to business owners who provide health insurance to their employees through the Affordable Care Act marketplace and would pledge to ensure one-third of federal contracts are awarded to small businesses.
The Harris proposal also includes the launch of a small business expansion fund which would provide entrepreneurs with low or no-interest startup loans, providing new businesses with inexpensive capital to get their enterprise started. Soldati said that could make a huge impact down the line.
“Something like half of all small businesses fail in the first year,” he said. “To me, that’s because of under-capitalization. Anything we can do to better capitalize these early starters, because many of those businesses that fail in the first year could turn a corner.”
Howard Chandler of Laconia, who’s spent a career active throughout a network of nonprofit and not-for-profit organizations in the Lakes Region, described himself as a bona fide independent and said he felt carefully optimistic about Harris’ proposal. He attended last week’s rally.
“She’s hitting it exactly right,” Chandler said in an interview. “That’s going to be huge.”
Chandler said startup capital is generally the biggest hurdle for a new business owner to overcome and the proposal, if enacted, may give businesses the chance to survive. He expressed some skepticism regarding the number of new business applications Harris said she’d like to receive.
“Twenty-five million sounds like an awful lot to me,” he said, noting if even 80% of those new businesses survived, it would be a great accomplishment.
Chandler said the proposal was well-received by the crowd in attendance at the Harris rally, but he would have liked to hear her speak to labor issues. He said support for unionization is needed and hospitality, long-term care and restaurant workers are often exploited and deserve better collective bargaining power.
And U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan said last week the plan proposed by Harris, if implemented, could make huge impacts for local and small business owners and would, in turn, give the economy a boost.
“She presented her overarching vision, which is: we need to continue to lower costs for families, we need to stand up for individual rights, including a woman’s most fundamental freedom to make her own health care decisions, and we need to safeguard democracy so that we can work together to implement things like this plan for small businesses,” Hassan said. “We have made progress an unprecedented number of new small businesses have started up under the Biden-Harris administration, but there’s a lot more we could do to unleash this kind of innovation and entrepreneurship.”
Hassan said the lessening of red tape would be particularly impactful, as small businesses don’t generally have the same access to resources or legal support for compliance issues as larger corporations do. The plan could spur innovation and growth in New Hampshire.
“I thought it was a really important outline and framework,” she said. “It reflects what I know, representing New Hampshire, which is such a strong small business state, that there’s just all of this pent-up interest and desire to innovate and to grow.”
She said cutting red tape to make it easier for small businesses to work with the federal government would also prove impactful for Granite Staters.
“It would have a very strong impact a number of small businesses in New Hampshire contract with the federal government and it’s a really important part of their business model,” she said. “It also is something we want to enable more small businesses to do.”
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