Small business owner writes about the importance of the Small Business Deduction
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (July 23, 2024) – The West Virginia News published an op-ed by Kyle Lindsey, owner of Bob’s American Store & Cafe and an NFIB member business in Shady Spring. He explains the importance of the 20% Small Business Deduction and calls on Congress to make the deduction permanent before it expires next year.
Read his column below:
Congress Must Keep Tax Relief for Small Business
You have to ask a lot of questions before you start a small business. Where are we going to set up shop? What products are we going to sell? Who should we hire and how much can we afford to pay? The list goes on.
I thought about all these things when I was serving in the Army. A buddy and I had come up with the idea for a small business — a restaurant and store where everything’s made in America. When we hung up our uniforms, we turned that idea into action. We opened Bob’s American Store & Café in Shady Spring earlier this year.
But little we did know, there’s another question we should have asked: What will we do if Washington, D.C. hits us with a massive tax hike?
That’s what will happen at the end of next year, when the Small Business Deduction expires. The deduction, which lets us save 20% of our business income, is the most important part of the 2017 tax cuts. The commonsense policy was designed to help Main Street and mom-n-pop shops compete with big businesses.
Lord knows, big businesses have a lot of advantages. In the 2017 law, corporations got a rate cut from 35% to 21%. But while the corporate relief is permanent, the Small Business Deduction is temporary. If it disappears, stores like mine will suffer. We’ll find it harder to keep up with big corporations, much less do everything we’ve planned.
Although we didn’t realize it at the time, the Small Business Deduction helped us set up shop in the first place.
To start, it made everything we buy more affordable. As a business that combines restaurant and retail, we buy a lot of products — everything from organic food to garden tools. We buy it all from other small businesses and small farms, and when they save money, they keep their prices low. That’s helped us do the same, selling everything at prices people can afford.
The Small Business Deduction has also helped us build our team. It has given us the money to hire more people and pay them more. We’re about to hire our third employee, and by the end of the year, we hope to have five. If the deduction stays in place, in future years we’ll have even more money to spend on hiring workers and hiking wages.
But if our tax cut disappears, we’ll suffer. We won’t be able to grow as fast. We’ll pay more for the food and goods we buy from other small businesses. They’ll be suffering, same as us. And as they raise prices, we’ll have to do the same.
Only Congress can save our small business, our team, and the customers and community we serve. Our representatives and senators should fight to make the Small Business Deduction permanent before the year is out. If they can’t do that, they should make it a top priority in 2025, no matter who wins the presidential election.
The longer they wait, the more my new small business will start to pull back, in preparation for the worst. And if our leaders let the Small Business Deduction expire next year, we’ll struggle to grow and give back to our community for decades to come.
That’s another question I never knew I’d have to ask: Will Congress cripple my small business almost as soon as we get off the ground?
Kyle Lindsey owns Bob’s American Store & Café in Shady Spring. He’s a member of the National Federation of Independent Business.
Background:
The 20% Small Business Deduction (Section 199A) allows small businesses organized as pass-throughs (S-Corporations, LLCs, sole proprietorships, or partnerships) the ability to deduct up to 20% of qualified business income and is scheduled to expire in 2025. The Small Business Deduction was created in the 2017 tax law to bring small businesses’ tax rates closer to that of their large, corporate competitors.
In an NFIB member ballot, 91% of NFIB members said they supported permanently extending the expiring provisions of the 2017 tax law. According to NFIB’s 2021 tax survey, nearly half of small business owners (48%) reported that uncertainty of expiring tax provisions is impacting their current or future business plans.
Learn more information here.
