Obama Moves To Help Small Businesses By Putting Them On Welfare

That’s about what this amounts to.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama will announce steps on Monday to make it easier for small business owners to borrow money, using $730 million in stimulus funds to cut lending fees, boost loan guarantees and expand other programs, officials said.
“We know that small businesses are the engine of growth in the economy,” said Christina Romer, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. “We absolutely want to do things to help them.”

If the Obama administration is so interested in helping out businesses why don’t they let businesses keep more of their own money? Setting aside for a moment the fact that this $730 million in subsidy is a drop in the bucket compared to, say, the $5.2 billion payoff ACORN got from the “stimulus,” does it make sense for the government to spend tax dollars to administer a subsidy for businesses when we could just cut taxes for those businesses?
Obama has promised to let the Bush tax cuts expire, which will jack up taxes on investment into these business. Obama is also promising to raise taxes drastically on people grossing over $250,000/year in income. Most of those people are business owners. And Obama is promising to implement a carbon cap and trade system that will cost businesses tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to comply with. Maybe even millions.
So he’s piling up bigger taxes and more regulations on private businesses, and then “helping” them with a paltry $173 million subsidy that isn’t likely to really accomplish anything?
That doesn’t even make any sense. But then, Obama’s intent here probably isn’t so much to help these businesses as appear to help them. Because his real goal, I think, is to have every business in America dependent on big government.