Dear Friend,

This week, the Small Business Administration released a study laying out the substantial impact that Washington regulations have on small businesses. The report showed that small businesses incur up to 42 percent higher costs due to regulations than larger firms. This is because with a small workforce, a business owner has to shift his/her staff’s focus away from their primary responsibilities in order to comply with government mandates and regulations.

Since my time as mayor and as a former small business owner, I know that these entrepreneurs are the individuals who will lead a national economic recovery. In Fort Worth I had first-hand experience with this. In the early 1990s, North Texas lost 50,000 jobs in a short period of time. We came together as a community to find solutions that were centered on diversifying our local economy through small business assistance initiatives.

Today, I had the pleasure of celebrating the 15th anniversary of the Texas Manufacturing Assistance Center (TMAC), one of the great solutions of our community-wide effort to stimulate economic growth in the 1990s. TMAC has served as a one-stop shop for businesses that wish to innovate, expand and compete in a 21st Century economy. To date, TMAC has worked with over 4,000 businesses statewide and has contributed to $1.2 billion in additional revenues to the state’s economy.    

If we want to come back stronger than before we have to be creative and come up with solutions that demonstrate an understanding of who the real job creators in our economy. We should not solely rely on big business to hire back laid-off workers – we should support the launch of new ideas while giving our existing businesses the tools to compete.
 

Sincerely,


Kay Granger