Entrepreneurs leave the Republican party
(posted by jackson)
Inc magazine is the bible of entrepreneurs in the U.S. When it was starting out in the 1980s, its readership was a monolithic Republican block. But now, everything has changed:
The market research company MarketTools conducted a very scientific survey of entrepreneurial small-business leaders “representative of the U.S. small-business sector as a whole in terms of geography and company size,” or so the official methodology language goes. We called it the Inc.-Zoomerang Entrepreneurial Report; Zoomerang is the online feedback tool for MarketTools.
Guess what? The entrepreneurs came out for Clinton and regulated health care. Of 1,000 respondents, 22 percent said if the presidential election were held at that moment (mid-October), they would vote for Clinton. Seventeen percent backed Rudy Giuliani, with Fred Thompson and Barack Obama tied for third at 11 percent each.
I take this as yet another measure of the decline of the GOP. Its extremism is driving away those who used to be among its strongest supporters.
March 6th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Big business has had a history of switching to the Democrats, though, when they can use the welfare state to subsidize corporate operating costs. It’s mainly the largest corporations that still offer health insurance as a fringe benefit, and it’s probably the fastest-growing part of their personnel costs. They’d love to have the taxpayers foot the bill instead.
March 6th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
Kevin is right: How many CEOs of Fortune 500 (or 2000) corporations are libertarians and free marketeers, rather than corporatist?The answer, as far as I know, is: zero.
Your real libertarians tend to come from small businesspeople — among others. {Mona edited}
March 11th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
The comments above from Kevin and Mona are examples of statements that make me take their rants against corporations with a HUGE grain of salt.
The original post is about the views of small businesses/entrepreneurs regarding the role of government in health care; not the views of large corporations and their CEOs. The comments leave me thinking that either Kevin and Mona don’t care about the topic or they simply don’t know what they are talking about.
March 11th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
To address the topic, entrepreneurs favoring a shift of the health care burden to government and away from businesses is not surprising. People start businesses to make money and, ideally, do something they are passionate about; not assume some level of responsibility for the health care of the people they employ.
Most new businesses fail within a short period of time. The stat used to be something like 9 out of 10 in the first 12 months. I doubt its changed. Government taking on the expense of health care allows start-ups to take it off their P&L and removes the advantage larger, established competitors have in using health care plans to attract employees.
March 11th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
I confess Patrick D is correct. I read the post too quickly and caught the reference to Inc., but missed the “small-business” part.