Citizen Journalist: A plan for boosting local economic development

by Mike Martin

June 27,2008

A recent comment from statehouse candidate Chris Kelly reminded me how I started writing for publication 15 years ago.

To staunch the flow of illegal immigrants, Kelly asserted, we must crack down on the businesses that hire them.

But as I noted six years after starting an environmental engineering firm in the Seattle area, by clouding the American dream with a fog of disincentives, government shares as much if not more blame for problems like illegal immigration and the lack of American competitiveness that inspires businesses to hire undocumented workers.

American dreamer

"So you want to start your own business, create prosperity, hire good employees and create taxpayers," I wrote, from my own experience, in a 1993 article for the Puget Sound Business Journal. "So you want to live the American dream."

You, Mr. or Mrs. Honest Entrepreneur I presumed, want to make sure your vendors get paid. You want to make payroll, on time, every time, because you're responsible for the livelihoods of your new hires, with their young children and pregnant wives and disabled husbands.

You've just signed a three-year lease on your new office space and you want to pay your rent. You want to render unto Caesar – pay your taxes, too. Ultimately, you want to grow, "maybe a little, maybe a lot."

"I'm convinced that most people who go into business are honest, hard-working American dreamers," I wrote. "Just the kind of people America needs."

But then, as now, we discourage the dream of hard work, suitably rewarded with a gauntlet of greed – not the corporate variety, but the government kind.

Take our new business owner, "Sam." From the day Sam opens her doors, she'll become a tax collector for the State of Missouri and Uncle Sam, rendering everything from sales taxes to employee taxes and a cartload of other tribute besides.

Once Sam incorporates, she'll pay a "franchise tax" just for doing business in Missouri – even if she hasn't earned a dime. If she makes money, she'll pay a corporate income tax, too.

When Sam decides to hire even one legal employee – call him "Joe" – the first thing she'll have to do is apply for an IRS EIN – Employer Identification Number. In with Joe – a legal U.S. citizen – will march Caesar’s army: federal withholding tax; Social Security withholding tax; Social Security employer tax; Medicare tax; federal unemployment tax; state unemployment tax; and state disability taxes, all demanding that Sam collect and remit them at least four times a year for as long as she stays in business.

The paperwork alone will become a logistical nightmare.

Ditching the disincentives

On Joe's first day, a battalion of employee-related regulations will storm Sam's business, too. Many regulations – like child labor laws and worker safety standards – are critical. But just as many others are the cudgels of a conspiracy that pads the pockets of lawyers and bureaucrats.

So atrocious and unethical has this conspiracy become that it finally blew up in some unsuspecting faces. Trial attorneys like Richard Scruggs, Bill Lerach and Melvyn Weiss – notorious for a competitiveness-killing creature of the U.S. legal system called the “baseless corporate class action lawsuit” – are now headed to jail for corruption and bribery.

Awaiting their eventual comeuppance alongside the tort kings is another industry of shakedown artists who partner with the government to besiege honest businesses with dubious discrimination charges. Take the May 2008 case of six women – legal immigrants from Somalia – who filed a religious discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against a Minnesota tortilla manufacturer bound by food safety regulations to require pants-and-shirts uniforms.

Now represented by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the women insisted on wearing traditional Islamic clothing of loose-fitting skirts and scarves. CAIR refused to make the women available for interviews last week, effectively silencing their voices about the merits of their own complaint. The lawyers and bureaucrats are readying their cases, already fighting in the court of public opinion.

Mission Foods, the tortilla maker who dared say "no way," meanwhile says it has "positions that need to be filled."

"I would suggest that the company hire someone else," wrote a blogger commenting on the story. "If necessary, hire some illegal immigrants, perhaps from Mexico. They are a lot more likely to acclimate themselves to American culture."

The message here: "ditch the disincentives — hire illegals!" Mission Foods may be listening. Chris Kelly should be listening. Problem is, the U.S. government, the legal community, and organizations like CAIR aren't listening and don't want to.
As for Sam our American dreamer, she may be listening, too. But not until she finishes filling out Forms 940, 941, 944, 1120, W-2, W-3 and responding to Joe’s discrimination complaint. He just joined a church, you know, where everybody wears green hair.

Sam? Samantha! It’s getting late – don’t fall asleep in there. You know what can happen when you dream!

Popularity: 19% [?]