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Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism

To dissolve, submerge, and cause to disappear the political or governmental system in the economic system by reducing, simplifying, decentralizing and suppressing, one after another, all the wheels of this great machine, which is called the Government or the State. --Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution

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Location: Northwest Arkansas, United States

Friday, June 08, 2012

Small Business Survey: Licensing and Regulations Trump Local Tax Rates

I recently got some interesting information about a small business survey from Sander Daniels:

I'm Sander Daniels, co-founder of Thumbtack.com - we're a site where you can easily hire local help (photographers, tutors, carpenters, etc.). We've partnered with the Kauffman Foundation to conduct a survey of 6,000 of the small businesses on our site. We've ranked the friendliness of states and cities towards small business, and we're releasing the results this Tuesday, 5/8.

You can see the beta preview of the results here and a methodology and analysis paper here.

Here are some of the survey's most interesting findings:
  • Small businesses care almost twice as much about licensing regulations as they do about tax rates when rating the business-friendliness of their state or local government.
  • An important predictor of small business friendliness was whether small business owners are aware of their state or local government offering training programs for small businesses.
  • Small business owners ranked Idaho and Texas as the most business-friendly states, with Oklahoma City and Dallas-Ft. Worth taking top honors among cities across the nation. Vermont and Rhode Island found themselves on the opposite end of the spectrum, joined in the bottom-five by New York and California.
Every city and state has its own page with a visualization of that location's full results - you should check out some of the links above to see what I mean.

The rankings are based on a survey of real small business owners, like wedding photographers, auto mechanics, and yoga instructors.