Advocates for Independent Business Op-Ed Published in Wall Street Journal

In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, Stacy Mitchell and Fred Clements of Advocates for Independent Business (AIB) took the Congress of the United States to task for favoring the interests of big corporations at the expense of Main Street retailers and small businesses.

In “How Washington Punishes Small Business,” published on May 7, Mitchell, AIB’s coordinator and the co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and Clements, the executive director of the National Bicycle Dealers Association, a founding member of AIB, noted how “members of Congress love to evoke the diner and the dry cleaner, the neighborhood grocer and local hardware store,” thus one might assume that ensuring the well-being of Main Street is one of their central policy aims. However, the reality is quite different, they said: “The legislative track record … is one in which the interests of big corporations are dominant, and many laws and regulations seem designed to bend the marketplace in their favor and put small, independent businesses at a competitive disadvantage.”

Mitchell and Clements noted that since the late 1990s the overall market share of firms with fewer than 100 employees has dropped from 33 percent to 28 percent and there are nearly 80,000 fewer small retailers today than 16 years ago. “Dismissing these trends as merely the product of market forces misses the powerful way that government policy has tilted the playing field,” they wrote, adding that the Small Business Administration has steadily expanded its definition of “small” in a way that has shifted its support away from the businesses that are truly small.

“While the agency’s overall loan portfolio has grown, the number of small-dollar business loans backed by the agency — those under $150,000 — fell by two-thirds between 2005 and 2013, from 74,000 loans to just 25,000,” the op-ed stated.

Instead of providing lip service to small businesses, Mitchell and Clements urged, “It’s time that lawmakers reflect that value, not only in their rhetoric, but in their actions.”

For more information on AIB, visit indiebizadvocates.org; to learn more about ILSR, go to ilsr.org.