Inc. Media spoke this week with four Republican presidential candidates to highlight their unique views on entrepreneurship and how they would approach small business policy.
Key Details
- Perry Johnson: “Let’s stop catering to large businesses … Large businesses are taxed at 20% while everyone else is taxed at 37.6%. The tax cut didn’t help the average guy or the little guy. Let’s stop that.”
- Asa Hutchinson: “I’ve set a plan to reduce non-defense federal workforce by 10% … We’re going to have to look at ways to do things more efficiently and utilize technology. In Arkansas, I did that; I reduced state employment by 14% as governor, with 3,000 fewer state workers.
- Larry Elder: “People are leaving [California] and taking their tax dollars with them. If you’re a large fast food restaurant owner in California, the governor just signed a bill to set up a commission to determine the wages of fast food employees … There is a war on business people in California; they treat them like the villains.”
- Francis Suarez: “The first thing I would do is balance our budget so we can get our interest rate and inflation under control. That will be the biggest benefit to any entrepreneur, not making our life more difficult.”
Why It’s Important
As Inc. Media points out, it is infrequent for campaigns to speak on the issue of entrepreneurship and how they will specifically approach small businesses. The Republican presidential field is filled with dozens of candidates who are competing for the debate stage, although only 10 of them technically qualified for this past week’s Fox News debate in Milwaukee.
While many of the candidates used the questions as an opportunity to promote their personal policy preferences, they also discussed several of the ongoing issues facing the small business economy—including tax policy, business regulation, immigration, and monetary policy.
As Elder notes, the government often believes that “Business people can be squeezed and squeezed and squeezed and still remain,” but the policies of Blue states have generally correlated with national migration trends, with hundreds of thousands of Americans moving from states like California, Washington, and New York to Texas, Tennessee, and Florida.
The small business policies of whichever administration wins the 2024 election will have a significant effect on the country’s small business economy going forward and affect thousands of entrepreneurs in every state.
FiveThirtyEight reports that all four of these candidates are below 1%, including Hutchinson (0.7%) and Suarez (0.2%), while Elder and Johnson are not ranked. The current frontrunners are Donald Trump (52.4%), Ron DeSantis (14.4%), and Vivek Ramaswamy (10.1%).
