The tax reduction small business owners are taking advantage this year is the 75% reduction on the first 250,000 in income. The new tax cuts the governor of Ohio is proposing may seem like a good deal to many small businesses, until those businesses can see, the tax cuts will be minimal. For more news about small business news and what is happening in Ohio, follow the links below.
Meet Congress’s new small business leaders
Rep. Steve Chabot can empathize with small business owners. Before launching his political career – and between his two stints in Congress – the Ohio Republican and seasoned attorney owned and ran his own law practice in Cincinnati.
“We were a small storefront law office, and we had to deal with all the things that come with running a business,” Chabot said in a recent interview on the Hill. “I have seen firsthand the challenges that are faced by small business folks.”
It’s that experience that lured Chabot onto the House Small Business Committee when he first arrived in Washington 1995. After 19 years on the panel (he lost a reelection bid in 2008 only to win back the seat two years later), Chabot last month took over as chairman. He replaces Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.), who stepped down in keeping with self-imposed term limits.
Tea Party’s Disastrous Tax Cut Experiment Comes To Ohio
Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) wants to mimic a tax cut experiment that has already brought fiscal calamity and public service cuts to a state 600 miles west of his.
Kasich describes his $696 million tax cut as a helping hand to small businesses. But the design of the cut would put the bulk of that benefit into the hands of just a few high-income business entities with a handful of employees while providing just a few hundred dollars each to the vast majority of the people who would benefit, according to an analysis by the Cleveland Plain Dealer. For nine out of every 10 companies that would benefit from the Kasich cut, the total yearly savings would be $364 or even less.
For the remaining 10 percent of companies affected, savings could be as high as $8,000 a year, a number that Kasich administration officials acknowledge is far too low to create even a single job per company. Instead of pitching the cut as a direct job creator, the officials are marketing it as an “every little bit helps” move for hardworking entrepreneurs.
How social media can make your small business go gangbusters
Social media is constantly being touted for its brand-building power, and rightly so. But many small businesses fail to reap the expected benefits from their investments of time and money in social media, largely because they haven’t fully grasped the unwritten rule of social media marketing: It’s not which tools you use, it’s how you use them that spells the difference between profitable performance and lackluster results.
Like professional marketers, successful small business owners target their social media activities for maximum impact. While their competitors are adrift in a sea of tweets and blog posts, savvy strategists focus and fine tune their social-media plays. Consider three social media campaigns that generated big results through careful targeting:
- When Denver-based Sword & Plough launched its business to recycle military surplus material into tote bags and related products, it had a bold idea and grassroots support, including a $6,500 award from Harvard’s Pitch for Change competition. The firm’s start-up financing strategy focused on building its network of contacts via social media as the springboard for a Kickstarter campaign.
