Maybe Obama should have dinner with a few small business/startup founder people instead of a couple of billionaires in a giant hilltop compound.
On the "Stay out of our way" I do think the feeling is pretty broad across the board.
Oh really - how much extra do they pay?
What - they mean that other people's taxes are too low?
Do they actually mean "taxes are too low" or is that a proxy for "not enough govt services"?
I ask because the US govt collects about as much per person as Western European govts (and more than Canada). Yet, those countries do provide more services, but it's not because they collect more money. (The US has lower rates but has a higher gdp.)
That's a silly argument. There's nothing inconsistent about believing that it would be better off for the country as a whole if tax rates are higher, but not volunteering to personally pay higher than the current actual rate.
You play the game by the current rules, not the rules you are advocating the game change to.
If the country would be better off with $100B additional tax revenue, it would be better off with $5B additional tax revenue.
Interesting that you equate spending with services.
The deficit is spending - revenues. The latter are only slightly connected to rates, especially the top marginal rate.[1]
Are they looking to get more revenues from the 50% of the population that isn't paying much of anything or the 1-2% which is paying 40% of revenues?
Which reminds me - while the top marginal rate has jumped around a lot, the "tax revenue as a fraction of GDP" hasn't managed to top 21% for very long and tends to stick around 18%.
We're currently spending around 25% of gdp. Why will we be able to hit that with tax revenue?
[1] The estate tax has never been, and never will be, a significant revenue source. The very rich don't die often enough and they engage in significant estate planning. The estates of the rich folks who died in 2010 weren't going to pay much in taxes because they did estate planning in previous years.
In fact taxes are probably too favorable for VCs. They have a completely unnecessary and unfair loophole that should be closed.
Immigration is the biggest government policy issue impeding startups, and that's something Obama could help fix.
Betfair should be a Silicon Valley (or NY) company with billions in revenue. Instead, it's a UK company with $350M in revenue, available only to the UK market. See also Intrade, Hollywood Stock Exchange, etc. All due to regulatory issues.
How about automated medical diagnostics? Many prototypes have been built which outperform human doctors, but the entire industry is dead due to fear of litigation/FDA.
Leverage the internet to disruptively innovate in education? Good luck, with the massive subsidies given to the traditional system.
See also the regulatory issues that Ubercab, AirBnB and others are running into.
This isn't taxes, but it sure doesn't count as "stay out of our way".
- Attempts to keep all investment activity well-regulated and conformant to some definition of legitimate. Thus minimizing the risk that my money manager is going to lose my money on an illegitimate, thinly disguised gambling platform like the Hollywood Stock Exchange.
There's no reason why something like that shouldn't be tightly regulated -- HSX is not the same thing as the NYSE and shouldn't be allowed to take real money in exchange for fake value. The NYSE returns my investment when companies I've selected do well: actual value. The HSX returns my money when random celebrities have an on camera nipple slip: no value.
- Make sure that there are tight restrictions on what counts as a medical device, or as medicine. If there's something approved to go into my body for medical reasons, I want associated risks to be minimized. This is not where I want the boomtown to be -- I don't want to undergo the therapeutic equivalent of WebVan or Twitter.
- I also don't want just any jackass to be able to print a textbook off of Blurb and start selling it to my kid's teachers. Qualified jackasses only, thank you :) No seriously, the way education is decided in this country is currently suboptimal, but the goal is to have all children on the same page. I don't want to find out that my kid has been on some experimental curriculum that turned out to be a pointless waste of time.
But you're also wrong about this. It is possible to start an alternate education system, so long as you conform to guidelines about what you teach. I've never heard anyone complain that they couldn't get their education startup going because of "massive subsidies given to the traditional system." There are a number of folks trying to crack this one from different angles, from textbooks to actual brick-and-mortar institutions.
Or perhaps your goal is not to protect your money, but to prevent me from harmlessly entertaining myself in activities you dislike?
The same thing applies to manual medical diagnostics - you are free to pay extra for a human to give you a less accurate diagnosis if you want. Although I'm not sure why you think human doctors do such a great job - diagnostic procedures and surgery are not regulated by the FDA at all. Only devices are. So an automated medical diagnostic tool would actually be more regulated than the system we have now.
I don't want to find out that my kid has been on some experimental curriculum that turned out to be a pointless waste of time.
This already happens under the current system. Ever hear of "whole language"?
As opposed to losing it on a regulated, totally-not-gambling company like Enron, or in a regulated, totally-not-gambling market like sub-prime mortgage derivatives? Similar arguments could be made against the other two items as well, under the general framework of "regulatory capture". Your arguments presume that government regulation agencies always act in the best interest of the general public.
* I can't afford health care for my first employees.
* Stop making it so difficult to visit the US.
* Let me help my employees abroad emigrate to the US.
* Fix the patent system.
edit: I mean, isn't the best startup guy to talk to the kind who made himself a billionaire?
The point is that there are a lot of people who are currently running startups, most of whom are not much like Jobs or Zuckerberg (these are the "average" people). There are also many people who have not started a company, but who might decide to do so if circumstances changed slightly (the marginal people) [1].
In aggregate, both of these groups have just as big an impact on the economy as the few outlier successes.
[1] One might also consider startups which failed, but only barely, as marginal.