ROBIN HOOD IN REVERSE?

 This is a letter written to our senator from Eric Justian, outlining the problems our governor is causing small businesses.  This is just another in a series of hurting every day people to make the rich richer.

Senator Hansen,

My wife owns a successful jewelry store in Norton Shores. She employs herself and another employee, she's about to hire a third person AND she 1099s her bench jeweler as a contractor. She has generated and collected tens of thousands of dollars in sales tax for the State of Michigan in the past three years. That store that she started from the ground, up after she lost her job while she was six months pregnant during the worst recession in most of a century...that store...it keeps our family afloat and alive. She's a tough woman.

But for some reason I can't exactly figure out, our Republican leadership is about to RAISE her business taxes.

And the worst part of it...her tax INCREASE isn't even going to keep our son's elementary school from closing. Oh no...instead, her tax INCREASE is going to blow an additional one billion dollar hole in the State budget.

You see...under the current Michigan Business Tax that our leadership loves to hate, VERY SMALL businesses get a chance to get rooted and start hiring and collecting sales tax revenue for the state before they start paying income and tax on profits.

Snyder's replacement with the 6% flat tax is going to start taxing Very Small businesses where they were not being taxed before.

It's a tax INCREASE on mom and pop shops that doesn't even go toward fixing our budget shortfall. In fact...it's a tax increase for mom and pop shops that ends up making our budget shortfall WORSE...and that shortfall for the tax INCREASE on mom and pop shops is going to be plugged by taxing pensions of retirees.

This is not a business friendly solution. This is not a solution that fosters NEW business and start-ups in Michigan.

I'm not sure when Republicans started to stand for fleecing small businesses and hard working middle class Americans in this country in order to very literally hand our money to the large businesses. I'm not sure when you started to stand for that, Mr. Hansen. And maybe you don't. 

But this new tax code is punitive to start-ups and mom and pop businesses. It's going to shut down mom and pop shops across the state...shops that have been generating revenue for Michigan and creating local jobs for years.

This is a bad tax code. 

Eric Justian