By Victor C. Kirk
Who do you turn to before your small business bites the dust? I would have thought the Chamber of Commerce or the Mayor’s Office of Community Development or the North Delta Economic Development District Commission or the North Delta Planning and Development Commission.
Apparently not. It would appear that you are on your own. Even when the PPP money is supposed to bring relief, a timely payment means everything. But apparent it came too late. I heard that one business received one payment, but the strings and loops and lack of coordination meant the check came too late. I heard that the money could not get deposited in the correct account so one delay after another represented a nail in the coffin of another local home-grown business. The bank foreclosed on the property – so much for home grown financial institutions. You would have thought that whatever entity that has ties to the Small Business Administration or Governor’s office of Small Businesses could have come to the rescue. You would have thought that a membership in the Chamber of Commerce when your business revenue declines that someone in their office is monitoring the health of the business community and are prepared to send in the “recovery team”. Maybe SCORE is activated, or a coalition of banking institutions created a recovery team with a sole mission to maintaining a healthy bottom line and helping ensure that the number of successful small businesses remain intact. But I do not know why I would think this. Cities all around us are bankrupt and the only fair and equitable additional tax is one that can be placed on H2O. Property taxes disproportionately affect the wealthy and sales taxes disproportionately affect the poor. There are plenty of both in north Louisiana. And the water comes from pipes ladened with lead.
To add to this frustration of the decline in the number of small businesses in this area, is a belief that getting the federal government to back off of the supplemental pay added to the unemployment checks. Great thinking. The goal was to get business to up their game and create wealth by at least providing a “living wage” OPPS – a bad word – living wage is a union term and no one up here want to resurrect anything close to a union. 15 dollars was a start and based on the belief that at 15 bucks an hour you are immediately lifted from poverty. Look around you and just observe what the additional 300 dollars a week is doing to families in the area. People are purchasing homes and building additions to their homes and fixing up rental property since no one provides a bridge loan to at least bring the rental property up to section eight standards and paying off debt or paying down debt or having a special meal on Sunday’s that would normally be delayed or not even fathomed.
But to keep giving the money to the poor and frustrated means the existing businesses contend they cannot compete? They cannot or refuse to hire at a pay rate slightly above the federal trough or reconfigure how a “profit margin” is defined during a national emergency.
Critical thinkers are needed more now than ever. The easy way out suggested is a sad and pitiful approach to align with a pail of progressive thinkers who have created most of the wealth in the area.
Is this the only way out of this financial mess – retreat?
