Deeply Dissatisfied Job Creator Here…

Whew.  As I type still wait­ing for a House vote on the debt ceil­ing.  Am I going to take a vic­tory lap for cor­rectly say­ing on Mon­day that Boehner did not have the votes?  Nope — it is really too dis­heart­en­ing for words, as we still hur­tle towards chaos.

DC loves its sum­mer dra­mas, but after all this hot air, if they can pass a debt ceil­ing any­thing by Tues­day, the great­est tragedy will be that I have hardly heard the word JOBS at all out of a politician’s mouth in weeks.  How this whole foo­farawl (new word!) does any­thing but hurt the econ­omy or the job mar­ket is beyond me.

I’ve spent the sum­mer try­ing to pur­chase a sec­ond busi­ness; the phone bank that has done most of my call­ing for polls for the last 22 years.  And reluc­tantly, it dawns on me that I’m one of those saintly “job cre­ators” the Repub­li­cans keep yam­mer­ing about, so I may as well blog my expe­ri­ence as such:

• I don’t have a pri­vate jet or an oil com­pany, so I fail to see how cut­ting those busi­ness tax loop­holes mat­ters to most small entre­pre­neurs like myself.
• I need a loan for the pur­chase amount, was turned down by the 1st mega­bank because I don’t have enough equity in my home accord­ing to their now too-depressed and aus­tere eval­u­a­tions — but hey, I can prove them wrong by sell­ing my house, except I don’t want to do that…
• Got a bank loan from 2nd mega­bank because I got an SBA guar­an­tee back­ing the loan — mean­ing that the full faith and credit of the United States (soon to be seen only in his­tory books) pledges to make good on my loan — thank god for big gov’t pro­grams like the Small Busi­ness Admin­is­tra­tion, because banks still ain’t lend­ing money, unless you already have a lot.
• I am buy­ing this busi­ness because they are sim­ply the best ven­dor I’ve ever worked with, and with the owner retir­ing, I’d rather take the big leap and buy the means of pro­duc­tion for my research rather than risk the sub-standard qual­ity prod­uct I get else­where — but for 17 peo­ple, it means they won’t lose their jobs in a depressed economy.
• I have got­ten tremen­dous amounts of help in this ven­ture from the state’s SBDC (small busi­ness devel­op­ment cen­ter), a con­glom­er­a­tion of state, local, and fed­eral gov­ern­ment resources that helps peo­ple go from a busi­ness plan to ya know, being a job cre­ator and suc­cess so I can com­plain about how high my taxes are.
• I am rac­ing to close the loan before inter­est rates go up.  I’m assess­ing how many employ­ees I need, both for the phone bank and for Vic­to­ria Research.  Like many job cre­ators, I am hedg­ing my bets, try­ing not to pay idle employ­ees until I see work com­ing in, but want­ing to get peo­ple in for train­ing and sta­bil­ity, and maybe even make enough money to pay bet­ter ben­e­fits.  But I’m clutch­ing money to my chest because I fear default and the econ­omy get­ting worse, and when it looks like your gov­ern­ment lead­ers need a preschool style time­out, con­fi­dence is not high.  This is the pri­mary prob­lem for job cre­ators — the worry that I’ll have to pay the true cost of own­ing my own cor­po­rate jet some­day if Democ­rats “win?”  Nope, not wor­ried about that so much.