Gene Marks's Open Salon Blog

City of Philadelphia, Tax Those Bloggers!

Thu, 2 Sep 2010 12:09:09 -0400

An edited version of the column appeared on Business Week, August 25th, 2010

By Gene Marks

Bloggers in my hometown are up in arms this week. That’s because the City of Philadelphia is charging some of them a $300 lifetime Business Privilege tax. The city’s position is that many of the bloggers are accepting advertising revenue and are in effect operating a business within the city limits. How could they do this, the bloggers are yelling. This is a violation of free speech, they yell. It’s an outrage! We are being persecuted! To the City of Philadelphia I say: hip, hip hooray! Tax those guys! Because by doing so you’re actually helping small businesses, not hurting them.

Philadelphia doesn’t have a history of good government. Growing up here I’ve witnessed brawls in the city council chambers, corruption amongst its highest officials and the firebombing of entire city blocks. But this time it’s different. I applaud the City of Philadelphia. And I support this tax of bloggers. In fact, I don’t think it’s big enough. I think if you’re going to have a blog and use it for your small business you should pay a significantly higher tax. This way we can rid the world of lousy bloggers.

We can save small business owners a lot of the time they’re now wasting by blogging. And those small business owners who don’t have a blog can stop feeling so guilty every time their technology guy tells them they should. Because they shouldn’t. Why? Well, let’s face it, most small business blogs are terrible. People don’t know how to write, even if they did get a B in 8th grade English. Small business bloggers who have aspirations of becoming the next online Hemingway usually produce material that’s not even up to the standards of, well, of this publication. And that’s pretty bad don’t you think? Many small business owners are told by their IT advisors, marketing experts and public relations gurus that they should be keeping a blog. But the truth is they really have nothing important to say. I don’t care whether my office equipment supplier is a supporter of a free Tibet. I just want lower prices on ink toner.

The City of Philadelphia is providing us a service. They’re making us face the fact that most small business owners shouldn’t be wasting their time maintaining a blog. They should be spending their time making sure their products work as well as they say. Instead of writing about the state of society and whether Barack Obama is a Muslim or not (by the way, he’s NOT a Muslim for goodness sake) they should be reviewing their overhead, meeting with potential customers and helping their employees do a better job. Not blogging. This is not to say that there aren’t good bloggers. There are some great ones in fact. But take a look around.

There’s a trend here. The best baseball players are the guys in the MLB (except for the guys playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates, of course), not the guys on your Sunday softball team. The best pilots are flying on commercial airlines or military aircraft, not those idiots landing their private planes on the interstate because they forgot to check their fuel gauge. And the best bloggers are professional bloggers – writers and journalists and pundits who blog full time and who not only have something interesting to say, but know how to say it in an interesting way.

Don’t believe me? Check out Andrew Sullivan’s Dish or Ben Poken’s Consumerist. And by the way – these professional bloggers have staffers who help them blog too. Just to make sure the information and research is accurate.The reality is that most small business owners I know find blogging to be too much time and money. Sure, any bozo can start blogging for free on hundreds of tools available like Google’s Blogspot of Wordpress. Don’t believe me? Just check out Barbara Streisand’s latest comments on Jennifer Aniston’s photo shoot. It just takes a lot of time.

And the one thing that most small business owners do NOT have is a lot of free time. And if you, or someone else in your company, don’t spend enough time keeping your blog up to date and interesting then no one is going to read it. And if no one is reading your blog then the whole exercise is kind of useless, isn’t it? Most small business owners I know who ventured into blogging learned this lesson the hard way. And they stopped doing it. The City of Philadelphia is doing their part to help us realize the truth!

But you don’t believe me, do you? You want to have a blog for your small business, don’t you? Look, I’m not going to stop you. In fact I’ve got a blog for my small business too. But here’s a few things I’ve learned about small business blogging technology that every entrepreneur should know. The smart business people I’ve met who succeed with their blogs make the investment in this technology like any other marketing technology. If you’re going to do it, do it right or don’t do it at all. They commit to posting something at least once a day. They generally pay (yes pay) one of their staffers or an outside person to do research, post content and manage comments. For example, I pay three people in my company to post tips for using our software products throughout the month to our blog. They each do about 10-12 posts. I also then post links to columns (like this one) and other writings I do as well. It’s a marketing expense.

And it’s a customer service expense. Another thing small business owners who’ve succeeded with this technology do is link it to other technologies. For example, some of my clients have accounts on LinkedIn, Twitter and FaceBook. Then they use social media aggregator technology like Ping, Profilactic, or Strands to connect all of these sites, and other social community sites, together. This way they can send one message and it’s posted everywhere. Of course, these messages have character limitations like Twitter, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing either. Maybe what you’ve got to say can be edited down to a few key phrases. Guys, can’t we find some way to apply this theory to our wives?

Do people read my blog? Not a whole lot. We get a few dozen comments each month. Sometimes a random client will mention something that they saw on my blog (which always makes me wonder if that person really doesn’t have something better to do with his time). But our blog is just one way of getting our software tips out. The same get posted to the social community sites mentioned above and they also get regenerated in our monthly newsletter which goes to clients and others using our products. This works well for us because our customer community has been fragmenting over the past few years. A few idiots play Mafia Wars on Facebook. Others participate in long-winded discussions on Linked In (“Group members: Define your perfect customer. Please discuss” Barf. ). Others like to tweet. And still the lion’s share like to get a good old email with good old relevant information. It all starts with our blog and then disseminates from there. For us and a few other small business owners I know, blogging is a good marketing tool that we use to communicate product information to our customers. It makes good business sense and is worth the effort. We would pay the $300 to the City of Philadelphia.

But for the large majority of my clients and other small business owners blogging is not a worthwhile exercise and serves only to clog up the internet with nonsense and provide busy work for public relations firms and technology people. So thank you, City of Philadelphia, for taking a stand here. Tax those silly bloggers into oblivion. Free them from the burden of blogging. Help these business owners realize that they should be spending their time more productively…and profitably. Oh, and by the way….maybe with those proceeds you can afford another trash truck to come by my house a little more often?

Follow Gene on Twitter: @genemarks, and find him on Facebook: facebook.com/quickerbetterwiser

Preventative Care: How reform affects businesses now

Thu, 2 Sep 2010 12:09:35 -0400

An edited version of this blog appeared on Business Week, August 24th 2010

Well, another men’s over-40 softball season is over and my team performed as expected: we were 3-15. And I’m feeling every inning of those fifteen losses. My hamstrings ache and my knees are throbbing. I have a bruise on my right hand where I fell trying to catch a routine pop fly. And I’m going to the bathroom a lot more in the middle of the night, but I don’t think this is softball related. That’s right – my body’s going to hell. And just when the new healthcare reform act is taking shape. Great timing! I’m not sure if its provisions are going to help my sore back anytime soon. But it’s definitely going to affect my small business, and many others like me, right away. Business owners and fellow over-40 softball players: are we ready?

We better be…for more bureaucracy. Think it’s fun filling out those W-2 forms at the end of each year? Well, if you like that, then you’re going to love the new healthcare reform act. That’s because starting in 2011 employers will need to begin reporting the healthcare benefits received by each employee on their W-2. What? You say you’re not tracking that information? Well, we all better start. We’ll need to make sure our health insurance providers are furnishing us that information. Or we’ll need to track it ourselves. And it better be right. Because it’s our responsibility to make sure the numbers we’re reporting are accurate.

Did I mention my back is sore? That’s because of all the times I’ve been bending over to watch those ground balls skitter between my legs. And now things are going to get worse. Because I’m going to spend a lot more time hunched over my desk filling out 1099s. You know what those are – the forms which report the amount of money you paid to independent contractors and self employed individuals over $600. Beginning in 2012 we’re going to be required to send a 1099 to those guys….and everyone else who received more than $600 from our companies during the year. And they’ll be sending us a 1099 form too. Oh, my aching back! I don’t know the Employer Identification Number (EIN) or social security number of every vendor in our system, do you? Well, we better start calling them.

Don’t have the resources to generate hundreds of 1099’s every year?

Then get ready to break your back writing more checks…to your accountant. Wait a second…is filling out more 1099’s going to help our healthcare system? No more than those shin guards our catcher insists on wearing even though we play slow pitch. Look…it’s all just part of the game. And to play this game, I’m going to make it a point to have a heart to heart meeting with my insurance company. That’s because I’m expecting yet another significant rate increase. Is it because I’m seeing a physical therapist more often than my wife? Or that I can now identify my urologist in a crowd just by looking at his index finger? Oh yes. As an over-40 guy, my health demands aren’t decreasing. Yet the regulatory demands on the insurance industry are increasing. If your business was facing an economic downturn, significant uncertainty in your industry and a government ready to unleash heavy fines on your business just because you have the audacity to earn a lot of money (plus you have to replace unhappy urologists who are forced to perform obscene procedures on over-40 guys like me) wouldn’t you be grabbing as much cash as you can while you can? Exactly.

The healthcare reform act is requiring health insurance companies to step it up this year. The law says they must now be providing coverage for dependants up to the age of 26. And they must be providing coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, like an inability to hit a slow pitch softball thrown by a retired dentist. So I’m damned well going to make sure my health insurance company is living up to its end of the bargain and offering these additional coverages to my existing and potential employees. These benefits may not only help me keep my good people on staff, but offer potential employees an incentive to leave their previous employers and join me. Maybe I can recruit a couple of guys who can catch a softball too! And if my insurance company complains I may just report them to my state – because the new healthcare reform act is providing funding to certain states to investigate excessive premiums.

I’m going to have a heart to heart with my accountant too. No - not because his base running is atrocious or his fielding stinks (the guy weighs 300 pounds and has diabetes for goodness sake). It’s because the new healthcare reform act is offering some potential tax incentives for my business. For example, there’s now a tax credit available for small companies with less than 25 full time workers who cover at least fifty percent of their employees’ health insurance costs. The credit is 35% of our health insurance premiums and it’s slated to increase to 50% in 2014. The benefits of this tax credit, of course, will be offset by my accountant’s fees as he struggles to figure out the calculation and determine how much of this credit begins to “phase out” under the law’s obtuse provisions. But I’ll take what I can get. I’ll also look for a wellness grant too. The new act gave the Health and Human Services department $200 million and the authority to award workplace wellness to companies employing less than 100 people. To be eligible I should have no existing wellness program in place (check!) and would have to meet certain “health awareness” criteria (reminder to self: remove beer from company fridge). I’ll need to get my employees involved and “provide initiatives to change unhealthy behaviors and lifestyles”, like throwing tantrums on the softball field every time our center fielder drops a fly ball.

Finally, I need to start thinking about 2014. Because that’s when the you-know-what is really going to hit the fan. Our best player will be retiring to an over-55 community in Boca. Oh – and that’s also the year when everyone’s going to be required to have health insurance – either on our own or through employers. That’s the year when those mysterious insurance exchanges will be setup offering less expensive coverage for both individuals and small employers. Will I continue to pay and provide health insurance for my employees? Or will I scrap the whole thing, tell my people to get the coverage on their own, and pay the $2,000 per employee annual penalty. What makes more sense for my bottom line? For my employees? For my company’s competitiveness? This is not a decision I plan on making in 2013. I will need to choose a direction in the next year or two. I’ll need to discuss this with my employees and make sure to help them with this transition. I can’t just yank away their healthcare coverage on the last day of the year. I have to give people time to adjust. That is, if I want to keep my people happy. Hey - maybe these new reforms can provide extra coverage so I can start taking steroids. That’s pretty much the only way I’ll hit one out of the infield.

Follow Gene on Twitter: @genemarks, and find him on Facebook: facebook.com/quickerbetterwiser

Get Paid. Quicker. Better. Wiser

Thu, 2 Sep 2010 12:09:11 -0400

An edited version of this column appeared on Forbes, September 1st, 2010

Isn’t it fun waiting to be paid? Don’t you just love calling on customers when an invoice is overdue? Or being given excuses like “your invoice got lost” or “we only process checks once a week/month/quarter”? As a business owner, collecting money is one of my very favorite things to do. What, you don’t agree?

Kimberly Martinez doesn’t agree. Like most normal small business owners, she struggles to get money in the door on time. Her $2 million a year fashion accessories firm Bonitas International LLC (www.boojeebeads.com) sells lanyards, “organza bags” and other things my teenage daughter and wife would buy. Kimberly’s wholesalers have been taking longer to pay her. And it’s been frustrating. So she did something about it.

About a year ago she signed up for American Express’s AcceptPay (www.acceptpay.com) service. And things have gone quicker and better.

Now she’s sending out electronic invoices to her customers. The invoices are customized to her business, showing her logo and personalized messages. She imported a customer list so the amount of time it took for her to get up and running was minimal. The invoices are saved and resent each time after she modifies the transactions. Some of her customers get recurring invoices too, which the service allows her to automatically setup. This way no billings fall through the cracks. And billings go out immediately no matter what distractions are taking her attention in the office.

The invoices get emailed to her customers. She requests a return receipt to make sure they got it. And for those especially “fun” accounts, she has someone from her office quickly call just to Make Sure they received the invoice in their email. It’s so easy to blame non-receipt on those evil spam filters, isn’t it?

The invoices have a link for immediate payment. Customers can use any credit card, not just American Express. All they have to do is click on the link, enter in their credit information and….Kimberly’s been paid. . The service can also be setup, with a little more effort, to initiate immediate transfers from the customers’ bank account if they authorize to do so.

This sounds like pretty simple stuff, doesn’t it? It is. For small business owners who take a little time to learn it. And the benefits are significant.

For starters, Kimberly doesn’t have to maintain or manage her customers’ credit card numbers. “That’s just a lawsuit waiting to happen, isn’t it?” she asks. It absolutely is. Mismanagement of personal data, particularly credit card data, has been a growing liability for small businesses. AcceptPay will take care of that headache.

Time has been significantly cut down. The customer does the data entry. Payments are recorded automatically. Kimberly can synchronize this data directly with her QuickBooks accounting system. Other customers can choose to just export payment data to a Microsoft Excel file for importing elsewhere. Data entry errors are minimized. A personalized receipt is automatically emailed to the customer for their records. Bookkeeping on both sides is minimized. And because it’s an online service, the data can be accessed from anywhere.

”My customers love this” says Martinez. “They don’t have to process checks. They’ve cut down on their own paperwork. They’re not dealing with getting invoices in the mail. They can pay us quickly. It’s another convenient option for them.”

But the big benefit is, of course, cash. In the bank. Quicker. Since implementing AcceptPay Martinez says that her time to collect an average invoice has decreased from 70 days to 53 days. That’s a 24% improvement. By knocking down a typical $100,000 accounts receivable balance by 24% over the past year, Gonzalez has earned a couple thousand bucks in interest and gave herself a little more bargaining clout when it comes time to pay her bills. And her bookkeeper has reduced the time she was spending on collections too.

AcceptPay costs $20 per month for unlimited everything – invoices, cash receipts and all the other bells and whistles. Transaction fees on credit cards still apply, but they always applied. A couple of hundred bucks a year to save a couple of thousand seems like a pretty good deal to me. Sure, I’ll miss the “fun” of collecting from those silly, non-paying accounts. But I think I can cope with that.

Windows 7 Isn't Doing It For My Business

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 07:04:37 -0400

An edited version of this column appeared on Business Week on April 15, 2010

I get this stupid idea every few years. As softball season approaches, as it is now, I go the sporting goods store and upgrade my equipment. Some years I’ll drop hundreds of dollars on a glove, thinking that I’ll actually be able to field ground balls better at shortstop. Or I’ll buy a new bat, thinking that this new and improved equipment will stop me from hitting all those pop-ups. And then with the first few weeks of the season, reality sets in. It’s my back, not my glove that prevents me from getting to those ground balls. And it’s my pathetic swing that causes those pop-ups, no matter what bat I use.

I get so optimistic about this stuff every year. I naively think that new, upgraded equipment will actually make a difference in my game. But in reality, most upgrades don’t work that way. Most of them aren’t worth the bother. Most of them aren’t worth the cost.

Five months since its release, Windows 7 is one of those kinds of upgrades. Maybe if you’re a Mac enthusiast this version stole enough features from Apple to keep you in the PC world. Or if you’re a big time graphics guy or gaming fan you found it worthwhile. But for every business owner I personally know, including myself, this upgrade brought about as much value as upgrading from Paula Abdul to Ellen Degeneris. In other words – zero.

There was a time when a new Windows release was a big deal. Going from DOS to Win 3.1 was one of those times. And going from Win 3.1 to Win 95 was an enormous event. Remember Bill Gates dancing as the Stones performed at one of Microsoft’s launch parties (they were celebrating the “Start” button)? Mick Jagger was only 52 back then. Now he’s 67. And he’s still Mick Jagger, only with a few new stretch marks. Unfortunately Microsoft Windows hasn’t aged as well. Particularly for this business owner.

Why? Because ever since that “Start” button was introduced back in 1995 there’s been no big Windows features that provided my company with much benefit. We haven’t upgraded very much. Back in October, most of my computers were running the rock solid, seven year old Windows XP. Unfortunately, like Joan Rivers’ plastic surgeon often reminds himself, you can’t beat Mother Nature. And a few months ago I was forced to make some changes. I had to replace a couple of older desktops which were wheezing louder than the Who at the Super Bowl. Which means my business entered into the Windows 7 world. And you know what I got?

Zero value.

Oh sure, there was a snazzy new interface. And a “docking station” on the top of my screen (which by the way is nothing but a glorified folder of shortcuts).   I’m told that I can make my computer more “personal”. No thank you. This is a business machine, not my car bumper. I’m also told I can “pin” and “unpin” items from the taskbar. And that I can better customize that same taskbar to add more programs and be notified when stuff happens. Ooooh – lookie, a little picture popped up when I put a CD in the drive. And wow, Dell tells me I haven’t purchased another one of their services in the past five hours. Do I really need this? Do my employees need this? This is like Comcast adding the Oxygen Network to my cable system and then calling it an “upgrade.” With all due respect to the “Sex Grandma” and “Tori & Dean” who’s watching that crap?

There are other unique new features of Windows 7 that Microsoft was touting. But these, like the interface, were useless to my business. For example, I can create “libraries” which, face it, is yet ANOTHER way to organize shortcuts – except this time it’s to a document. Useless. And I was told about using the “Aero” capabilities. Is this really saving time? I challenge any business user of Windows 7 to give me a productive use of this “snap” and “shake” feature without encouraging a sexual harassment lawsuit. Is this feature really making my people more productive? I don’t agree with their claims. Next thing they’ll be telling me is that Rikki Martin is in fact a gay man. C’mon…who would believe that?

It’s not all negative. My new Windows 7 machines have given me a few business benefits. They are (marginally) faster than my XP machines.   They are (marginally) better at recognizing new devices. I’m assuming that they are more secure, although this is accomplished through almost nightly updates downloaded automatically from Microsoft, not unlike my past experience.

But so much of Windows 7 is like the same operating systems of the past. Some of my applications still lockup and Windows spins around until it recovers. When errors are discovered the help provided is meaningless.   Like always, I just ctrl+alt+delete the program and start over, hoping that it won’t happen again. Networking still takes an IT professional to setup.   And now added to this headache is the frustrating exercise of trying to hunt through the new shortcuts and interface to find the same diagnostics and administrative functions from before. Since when did I need a treasure map to find the “services” shortcut? And what happened to the “run” command? We’ve wasted time re-configuring the Windows 7 interface so that we can find these old friends (which are still a critical part of the system) like we did in Windows XP. OK, maybe that’s just a learning curve on our part. But I can’t even explain to my kids what the Kardashians actually do to make them so famous, let alone explain to my employees Microsoft’s rationale for switching everything around on us.

And is it me, or does Internet Explorer 8 just seem slower than Firefox or Chrome? Yeah, must be me. Right?

Which brings me to speed. As I said before Windows 7 is marginally faster than Windows XP. But for a business owner, it’s all about speed. Marginal is not cutting it. You can have your libraries, your taskbars, your shakes and your snaps. Just give me speed. With every upgrade I want my computer to fly faster than before. I want it to immediately startup like my phone gives me a dial tone when I pick it up (unless you’re using Comcast’s phone service and it takes a few seconds). Don’t lock up. Don’t spin out of control for minutes trying to figure out why some program didn’t “respond”. For Windows to really provide value to my business in the future it just needs to be faster, faster, faster than any other operating system. That way my people can get their work done faster, faster, faster.

You know what else I’d like to see in a future version of Windows? A true business edition. No, not one that has various flavors of Office or “enhanced” security, whatever that means. I mean one that works all the time (emphasis on the word “all”) with most business applications. Believe it or not, there are no more than a hundred or so programs that most businesses of my size (that would be 20 million plus businesses with less than 100 employees) use. I know this. I sell this stuff. I want my operating system vendor to be married to my software application vendor. Except I want them to be different than most married couples: I want them to actually get along with each other. My clients still get QuickBooks, Peachtree, ACT, GoldMine and other errors on Windows 7. Most of them are due to incompatibilities. My “enhanced” taskbar does not fix these errors. And I can’t “Aero Shake” them away. Without this type of support, future Windows upgrades, like this one, bring zero value to me.

Running a business? Buying a new computer? Don’t get too excited about Windows 7. It’s fine. But I had to accept reality: this upgrade wasn’t much different than prior versions of Windows. And I’ll never be able to cover as much ground at shortstop like I used to.

Rahm Emanuel Does Not Have Cellulite...

Tue, 6 Apr 2010 22:04:17 -0400

An edited version of this column appeared on Business Week on April 6, 2010.

Nine months ago I wrote about healthcare reform and how it would affect small companies like mine. At the time I said I was in favor of the proposed legislation. At the time I said it would help reduce my costs and make it easier to budget future expenditures.

Well, a lot of things have happened since then. The economy’s improved a bit, the Yankees got lucky, and Joy Behar won a GLAAD media award. Yes, it has been a busy year. But with all that’s happened, one thing hasn’t changed: I still think the proposed healthcare legislation, even with all of its revisions, will be a good thing for my business.

Politically I haven’t changed. I’m not pining for George Bush, but I still lean to the right. Even so, I don’t believe a lot of the scary stuff I hear. I don’t believe there are “death panels.” I don’t think the government is “taking over” healthcare. I don’t believe our President is a “socialist.” And I don’t believe Rahm Emanuel has cellulite on his bottom, no matter what my sources in the Congressional gym tell me.

As a taxpayer I’m still very concerned about this proposed reform. I am concerned about the rising deficit. And a government trying to do too much too soon. I’m also very concerned about all the uncertainty: one expert says healthcare reform will bankrupt the nation while another guy says it’ll save us billions. These are huge, scary concerns with huge, scary repercussions. More scarier than the cellulite on Emanuel’s tush.

But as a business owner I’m not scared about health care reform. In fact, I’m kind of liking it. I’m not being forced to buy health insurance. That’s because I employ less than 50 people so my company would be exempt from this requirement. So if I were to choose not to have health insurance then my employees would have the ability to get it on their own. And they would also get tax credits to help them pay for it.

But I do offer health insurance. So it’s not a problem for me. Unfortunately the plan I offer kind of sucks when you compare it to what larger companies offer. The costs have gone up a lot over the past few years. Worst of all, these costs continue to be completely out of my control. So for years business owners like me have been whining and moaning for someone to do something about this mess. And so something is being done. Hopefully with success.

With health insurance reform there will be more people available for me to hire too. These are people that have life-threatening issues, like diabetes, multiple sclerosis, heart disease and Toyota ownership. Insurance companies consider some of these things to be “pre-existing conditions.” Studies have shown that many of these people are actually smart and would be good employees too. But many business owners, like myself, cannot hire these people because our insurance plans won’t cover their health expenses and we can’t afford to make up the difference. But with health care reform, this is something I hopefully won’t have to worry about. So no longer do I have to turn away prospective employees because my health plan won’t cover them. Now I can feel free to turn them away due only to their race, religion or sexual orientation. Phew!

Health insurance reform, as proposed, will help me compete with larger companies. I’ll be able to participate in insurance pools, which will hopefully mean I can buy products that offer benefits to my employees that I couldn’t offer before. This way I can compete on a more level playing field with my larger counterparts. I can mismanage my finances, overpay my top people and heartlessly lay off my people. Oh, and I can also provide coverage for dental, eye care and prescription drugs too.

If this legislation passes then I’m going to have more opportunities to outsource work and therefore keep my overhead under control. Why? Because there will be more people willing to leave their jobs and take subcontracted work from me. Why? Because the cost of health insurance won’t hold them back as much. It’s kind of tough to be entrepreneurial when the minute you leave your job you have to foot the bill for your own health insurance. With the tax credits proposed this cost will be significantly reduced for those individuals.   Look for a whole new crop of entrepreneurs to take notice of this…and give notice to their employers. And look for a bunch of business owners like me who will be taking advantage of their expertise…but only when we need to.

Another good thing? It seems like there will be more choices for me. Today there are the same slippery brokers representing the same cheesy health insurance companies selling the same boring products which, just by coincidence, increase in price the same amount every year. I’m told with health insurance reform there will be more options available to me. I’m told small businesses will be able to participate in national insurance pools and have better opportunities to purchase insurance for a lower price too. This shakeup should be interesting.

And guess what? I may be able to get a tax credit too. And I don’t need to save the world, be energy efficient, go back to college or even be charitable. Phew!   I’ll leave all those qualities up to Sean Penn. If things happen as proposed I may be eligible for a credit of up to 35% of the premiums that I pay. And there may be other incentives after 2014 if I buy my insurance through a state exchange. At least if I don’t provide insurance I won’t be penalized – that only affects firms with more than fifty people. But from what I read most firms of that size provide health insurance anyway.

Will the quality of our healthcare improve under these new reforms? Will the country save tons of money? Will our taxes go up? Will the Marriage Ref last more than a month? These are all big uncertainties. As a taxpayer and one who believes in less government I’m not crazy about these big proposals. But as a profit hungry small business owner I see no reason to complain.