Jet, since you didnt read my other thread I will post this here. It is a write in to The Atlantic ( a left leaning mag) by someone from Ohio. I interact with a great many small business owners in my line of work, and I can say that this view is absolutely spot on. This is how people feel around here.

From another reader in the Midwest, about the plight of the well-meaning small business owner:
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>>While I do talk to people with much the same narrative as your university librarian (we live in a college town, I work at a nearby branch of the state university), I'd note that I could sit here and type out similar narratives of frustration and despair, but from people who are almost by definition semantically excluded from those categories.

They're people I work with in church and Scouts and neighborhood activities who own and run businesses of three to thirty some fulltime employees, and they talk about how hard it has become to have fulltime employees, to manage their businesses, and to navigate local, state, and federal regulation. Any entrepreneur over 25 talks constantly about the upsweep of the curve, and in my opinion, especially the three or four I know most personally, how challenged they are by the whole health insurance situation along with all that.

My sense is that they WANT to do right by their employees, and they want to be above, but not ridiculously above, the average wage rate for our area, but the gamesmanship of finding a plan for their twelve or twenty employees is sucking huge amounts of their time, and only to end up paying dramatically more for what they then have to tell their employees is less coverage, both in their contributions and co-pays, and in what gets covered. I am president of a non-profit with twenty to thirty employees over these last eight years I've been in the saddle, and every two years we go thru exactly that, so I know what they're talking about.

I try to present the upside of a basic single payer national health policy, and removing health care insurability from employment status, and they're intrigued and attracted, but ultimately, fearful of a health care bureaucracy that echoes what they already deal with in employment and workplace issues, and so turn away . . . and are easily lured to the simplistic rants of Tea Party "starve the beast" anti-Obama voices.

That said, I do think there's a progressive/moderate case to be made that government is getting too intrusive into daily life (just got back from a parent meeting where we were told, due to federal regulations, that no bake sales can happen at school for any reason, period -- there's one fine example right in front of me), and yet is not as responsive as it should be when it ought: if I may mention your competition, this web article has gotten much play among the folks I'm talking about .

So there's a "mood of revolt" among those who have not, and I am both concerned by and sympathetic to the reasons why that is, but I think there should be a fair presentation of the "mood of resistance" that is out there among those who could be hiring, but are saying "yes, I have an extra $50,000 in the budget, but if I hire someone and it costs me $75,000, it could bring down half the company, so NO."

I hope that view from Ohio is useful to you.<<
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From: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arch...om-afar/244731/

Edit: This is the web article origionally referenced by the writer in the post - http://www.politico.com/politico44/perm/...923ea3919e.html

Last edited by Derid; 09/10/11 10:21 PM.
For who could be free when every other man's humour might domineer over him? - John Locke (2nd Treatise, sect 57)