2 ms·
This sounds like a really good point to me. If a politician wants to encourage small businesses, why not remove all fees to get up and running? Maybe provide fr
by rapind 5y ago
This sounds like a really good point to me. If a politician wants to encourage small businesses, why not remove all fees to get up and running? Maybe provide free lawyering and business plan consulting as well?
Too often incentives are locked behind a bunch of paperwork and hoops which require up front capital to take advantage of. Which creates a market for third parties to benefit from by charging for these services, instead of founders benefiting directly.
A great example of a horrible incentives program that results in this is SR&ED in Canada. I guess you could argue it employs a bunch of service providers to assemble SR&ED claims... so jobs?
You also pay at least $600 to incorporate in Canada and most often employ a lawyer to do it for you ($1,200+). Seems pretty counter intuitive if your goal is to promote startups and small business.
- andrewflnr 5y agoAs a recent small business starter, the most valuable thing to me would have been a complete, authoritative checklist of all the steps needed. All the licenses, registrations, etc, and dependencies between them. Sure, it will need a bit of customization for each business (need food service license?), but if it's still ambiguous after that, fix the law so it's not ambiguous. I generally think it's a human rights violation that law is so impenetrable to the people who are supposed to follow it, but it's especially obvious in this case that murkiness helps literally no one.