Lemonade Stands and Liberty Part 2: Taxes Kill Business

On the blog here.Episode art: Photo by Kaique Rocha on Pexels.comLast week, we talked about how licensing laws and ordinances impede entry into the market for so many, even kids. What happens once you have made your way through the red tape? Entrepreneurs pay a premium for choosing freedom.Some notes on tax rates here.Every wage we earn and everything we do is taxed, and that taxation is forced upon us without any “opt out” box to check. While we elect the people who make those tax rules, do we really think they were considering us when they designed these schemes?We don’t often hear about kids being taxed in their entrepreneurial endeavors, but it does happen (link here)How are we talking to our kids now about taxation to prepare them for entry into the market, or are we?What age is too young to start talking about this with your kids? How do you approach the conversation in an age-appropriate way? How do we encourage our children to take entrepreneurial paths when these are the statistics they will be working against (link):Majority of small business owners spend more than $1,000 on the administration of federal taxes:15% of small business owners spend more than $10,000 on the administration of federal taxes.16% spend $5,001-$10,000.33% spend $1,001-$5,000.15% spend $501-$1,000.21% spend less than $500.Entrepreneurship offers “freedom” but it’s also really hard. As many resources as are available for entrepreneurs, at the end of the day, you gotta build the business. You gotta have a product worth buying and a sales force able to sell it.There’s a kind of romance on entrepreneurism — how wonderful it is to be in charge of your own destiny — but what if it wasn’t the exception, it was the rule?What if we didn’t expect companies to be surrogate parents?What if we didn’t tie medical and dental, retirement and other “40-hour-per-week” benefits to someone else’s company? What if we were all independent contractors?