Myth 7: The tax cuts have made the tax system more fair to small business owners.
“We cut the taxes on the small business owners… It makes sense to let small businesses keep more of the money they make.” — President Bush, April 13, 2006
Reality:
The President’s tax cuts affect small business owners much as they affect the population as a whole: they provide large gains to those with high incomes and little benefit to others. One major benefit the President’s tax cuts have supposedly offered small business owners is the reduction in the top individual income tax rate, from 39.6 percent to 35 percent. Because small business owners pay individual income tax on their business income, the Administration contends that they are disproportionate beneficiaries of the rate reduction.
But a Tax Policy Center analysis found that only 1.3 percent of filers with small business income are subject to the top income tax rate and so benefit from lowering it. Moreover, these households hardly conform to the popular image of a small business owner: they derived, on average, less than a third of their total income from a small business. (
http://www.cbpp.org/3-21-07tax.htm)
An even more muddled mythology surrounds the issue of small business owners and the estate tax. Despite oft-repeated claims that the estate tax has dire consequences for family farms and small businesses, there is in fact very little evidence that it has any significant impact on these groups. An analysis by the Congressional Budget Office found that exceedingly few farms and small businesses owe any estate tax. Indeed, the American Farm Federation acknowledged to the New York Times that it could not cite a single example of a farm having to be sold to pay estate taxes.
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=692