Live from Music Row Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Job Creators Network’s CEO Alfred Ortiz to the newsmaker line to discuss the American Small Business Prosperity Plan and reversing current political course in 2024.
Leahy: It’s an honor to welcome to our newsmaker line right now, our very good friend, the President and CEO of Job Creators Network, Alfredo Ortiz. Good morning, Alfredo.
Ortiz: Hey. Good morning, Mike. How are you doing?
Leahy: I’m glad to have you on here to talk about the amazing American Small Business Prosperity Plan you announced last week by you and Newt Gingrich and a few others. Tell us about that plan.
Ortiz: Thank you very much for having me again. We are very excited about this. Newt Gingrich and I teamed up back in 2016 and 2017 to get the Tax and Jobs Act help pass, especially the small business provisions.
And so we teamed up again, and we’re excited about that because America’s small businesses have never actually been hurt more than they have been during this pandemic, and frankly, the post-pandemic era, and they still haven’t recovered.
And we need to do more for our small businesses. And frankly, this administration, I don’t think even can recognize a small business, even if he did walk into one.
Leahy: Now, that’s a very good point. (Laughter)
Ortiz: But you know what we need to do, Mike, is simple. It’s an eight-point plan, and I think it has some common-sense agenda items that we recommend to Congress, not only for Republicans, but we really urge Democrats to consider this.
I’m just going to list them out really quickly, and then we can circle back to them, if you don’t mind. The first one, one of the most important ones, is to make the Tax Cut and Jobs Act permanent.
A lot of the provisions are starting to expire, starting at the end of ’25. And next year, in fact, the expensing provision, which was one of the most important ones for small businesses, which is immediately being able to get that tax deduction for equipment and stuff that you buy, that one expires in that next year.
So it’s super important that that one is made permanent. But unleashing domestic energy production, we’ve heard a lot about what’s happening when you saw gas prices go to $5, now, they’re a little bit lower than that. But look, everything that we’re suffering from today, you can trace all the way back to the day-one decision of this administration when they decided to put, basically domestic energy production, on hold effectively.
He declared war on domestic energy production and all that. Everything we’re suffering today can be traced to that. In fact, even I would say Putin’s war in Ukraine can also be tracked back to that because he destabilized global energy and global energy production.
And Putin took advantage of that. Healthcare reform – we all know how much it is – it’s about $22,000 for small businesses to basically provide health insurance coverage for their workers.
That’s a huge thing that, frankly, Obamacare still didn’t take care of, which is reducing the cost of health care. So we need to address that and do some major reform on that front. Small businesses too, Mike, by the way, we’ve got to exempt them from the regulation. I mean, this continues to kill. Every time we see a regulation go by it’s really geared towards these large companies, large banks, large businesses, right?
But the impact on small businesses is so much greater. Look what happened during Dodd-Frank. So many – 500 – small business community banks went out of business. And guess where most of those were, Mike? Those were in minority communities. And so the very community that supposedly the Democrats of this administration try to help through regulations, quite frankly chokes a lot of these small businesses.
And we got to stop that. So we’re asking for exemption from regulations. Reigning in government spending, you know, that leads to high inflation. We’ve seen that. We’re experiencing it right now.
Access to capital. You and I both know, we’re small business owners, if you don’t have access to capital, right, you don’t have anything. We need to improve access to capital. We’ve got something called the dignity of work requirements, recipients of government assistance, that is so critical, I think it’s shaping the labor shortage that we are in today.
And quite frankly, the destruction of the American work ethic all goes back to kind of the overfunding of these overly generous government payouts that we did during the pandemic. And we got to bring that back. We got to bring that back. And then tough on China, tough on crime; and also getting our supply chain unobstructed. So those are broadly the eight points, Mike.
Leahy: Let’s go back to one in particular that is of interest to me: expand access to capital for small businesses. It’s getting harder and harder for small businesses to have the capital they need to run their business, either investment or banking or loans or even credit. What specifically can be done in that arena?
Ortiz: Yes, absolutely. One of the things there – and I heard this quote the other day which I thought was great, and I believe it’s actually from Jesse Jackson, but it says “capitalism without capital is just another ism.”
And so we need to make sure that we have the capital available. Fintech, we believe, is an area that can really be explored to really help provide greater access to small businesses with that capital. I mentioned Dodd-Frank again.
When you look at the regulations there, 2,500-plus community banks went out of business because they just couldn’t survive the cost to comply with the amount of regulation that was being put on them.
And so easing up, I think, especially on some of these small business community banks as well, on some of the regulations that are applied like peanut butter spread across evenly, no matter what size of business you are.
I think pulling back on some of those regulations and adding some exemptions would be key to improving the access to capital for small businesses.
Leahy: What’s going to happen with the expansion, the planned expansion of the IRS, the number of 87,000 agents? They’re going to go after small businesses, I think. What are your thoughts?
Ortiz: Absolutely. 100 percent. I think the American public sees that. They understand that, they get it. How many millionaires and billionaires really exist? At the end of the day, I think there are only like 400 and some odd billionaires.
You don’t need 87,000 agents to go after that. And frankly, any large corporation, any very wealthy individual is going to have a team of accountants and attorneys to fight it. So we know that that’s not where they’re going to spend their time.
They’re going to spend their time going after small business owners like you, like me, and like others of your listeners who, frankly, would just not be able to survive a tax audit.
So they basically make the decision to just write the check regardless of whether or not there is an issue or not. They just won’t have the energy. They don’t have the time, they don’t have the resources to fight it.
And so that’s where these 87,000 IRS agents are going to be, they’re going to be laser-focused on basically middle-income family income, middle-income families, and small businesses, Mike.
Leahy: Those 87,000 IRS agents – if the Republicans take over the House, they’ll pass legislation to get rid of them. But the Senate, we may or may not have the Senate.
And then Biden, he’s not going to sign any such bill. So are we stuck with 87,000 IRS agents to go after small businesses?
Ortiz: Unfortunately, that might be the case until we can actually in ’24 take further control of the White House. Because assuming we take control of the Senate and the House and so we have both Houses, to your point, the president can veto anything that the Republicans push through.
And so I think there’s hope of change in 2024 at the White House where we kind of reverse course and some of that stuff. But, you know, these are federal employees. Good luck getting rid of federal employees.
And this is what the Biden administration is counting on. They’re trying to cram everything that they can before this midterm election to try to pass and put in place as much as they can. Look at the loan bailout for student loans. The estimate now is about $420 billion. I think it’s going to be more than that.
But the CBO, the Correction Budget Office determines about $420 billion. About $100 billion of that, Mike, is going to happen on day one. All those people who have those Pell Grants, those are going to be automatically, basically forgiven. So that’s going to be about the tune of $100 billion right there. We got to stop this insanity.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Alfredo Ortiz” by Alfredo Ortiz. Photo “Small Business” by ELEVATE.
