After only a month, I hired my first employee. By the end of my first full year in business, I had 10 workers on my payroll, and after two years I had 50 employees. In each of the years that followed, the company got new customers, hired more people and made more money.
This is much harder to do today because we have saddled small businesses with burdensome regulations, incomprehensible tax rules and ever higher taxes. We’ve placed so many hurdles in their way that countless small businesses can’t even get off the ground.
We need to completely unshackle our entrepreneurs and small businesses and let them drive our economic recovery by creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs. To do that, we should eliminate the income tax for any small business with 300 employees or less.
However, owners would only be allowed to take out the money they need in the form of a salary or living wage, and any money that owners took out would be taxed as personal income. This way, the bulk of the profits could be reinvested in hiring more employees to grow the business further. That’s what I did and so too did many other entrepreneurs.
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In addition, if we removed income taxes for small businesses and startups, it would give them the runway they need to rapidly expand, and would free them to focus all their energies on product development and customer service. It would be pure free enterprise — small businesses would be let loose to grow, invest and make money. The only regulations they would have to deal with were those related to workplace safety and protection of the environment.
The benefits to Canada of unleashing small businesses would be enormous. Small businesses are woven into the fabric of our communities. They often hire locally, give back to the community and are less likely to pull up stakes and move overseas.
We’ve got to stop stifling our entrepreneurs by taxing them into the ground and making them jump through countless bureaucratic hoops. If we eliminated all income tax for small businesses, everyone would win: government would collect more taxes, Canadians would have more jobs and entrepreneurs would finally get a fair reward for shouldering all the risks associated with running a business.
In the final analysis, any society that stifles its people in the pursuit of creativity, productivity and ingenuity is a decaying society.
National Post
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Frank Stronach is the founder of Magna International Inc., one of Canada’s largest global companies, and an inductee in the Automotive Hall of Fame.
This content was originally published here.
