[pldr1234]

Trickle down economics has created one of the greatest rifts in wealth equality in history. Yet people like the GP still champion the concept and its variants.

I earn fantastically at work, but any vote I make will always be against the political party that spouts the same nonsense.

[andrewjl]

"Trickle down economics" did not cause that, a massive regulatory complex that protects incumbent monopolies did. An extensive rollback of regulatory complexity or a small business safe harbor exemption from everything but the critical health & safety pieces along with a Henry George land tax would solve our impasse. These are, sadly, not very popular policies.

The most durable way to build middle class wealth is entrepreneurship. And not the SV kind. Family-owned business have something very few publicly traded ones do... long time horizons. We've destroyed the ability for the middle class to do that outside a select coterie of sectors.

[hannasanarion]

There are a lot of reasons small businesses are dead, and regulation is not one of them. The US regulatory structure is extremely friendly to small businesses.

Small businesses are rare because the government has abdicated its antitrust responsibilities, ignoring companies that use anticompetitive practices like labor violations and price fixing that lock competitors out of the market.

Small businesses are also rare because of zoning codes and infrastructure policies that promote the use of cars. It used to be that commercial spaces and housing were evenly mixed, now businesses often need to be a mile or more away from anywhere people live, thus needing to be able to support very large customer bases, and the locations need enough land to fit empty parking lots big enough to support double or triple the actual capacity of the building itself, creating enormous artificial up-front capital costs for business ownership.

[nickpp]

> US regulatory structure is extremely friendly to small businesses

Try cutting hair in Florida if you think so.

[andrewjl]

> and regulation is not one of them.

> Small businesses are also rare because of zoning codes and infrastructure policies that promote the use of cars

Zoning codes and infrastructure policies are a form of regulation.

> government has abdicated its antitrust responsibilities

I agree with this part. A minimal regulatory regime along with a strong antitrust regime is pretty much ideal IMO.

> The US regulatory structure is extremely friendly to small businesses.

You can also see the quantity of regulations on this tracker. [1] I don't think you can describe this amount of regulatory complexity as "friendly" to small businesses.

[1] https://www.quantgov.org/federal-us-tracker

[hannasanarion]

Quantity of regulations is not the same as regulatory burden, and it's not like every single businness in the whole country needs to keep track of every single one.

In the food service industry, the most common type of small business, there are only 2400 federal regulations, and most of them concern common sense things, like "wipe tables after customers use them" and "cook chicken to 180°" and "don't let rats live under the oven". Take every type of food served in the US, every appliance, tool, utensil, or technique used by any commercial kitchen, and 2400 seems like a laughably small number of regulations.

[andrewjl]

> it's not like every single businness [sic] in the whole country needs to keep track of every single one.

That's an incorrect understanding of how laws and regulations work. Ignorantia juris non excusat.

> 2400 seems like a laughably small number of regulations.

I'd love to hear a food service operator's perspective. It may differ from yours.

[hannasanarion]

Please explain to me why a restaraunteur needs to know about the proper temperature for casting steam locomotive crank arms, or how many people need to be in a coal plant's fire response station. Under what circumstances will a food truck operator need to know those?

I worked in the restaurant business, I know how thoelse regulations work. Not every one applies to every business. We didn't serve eggs, so we didn't need to Cara about all of the special rules for cooking eggs to temperature, maintaining separate tools and workstations, refrigerator temperatures, etc just for eggs. 5he same is true of all the other thousands of ingredients and food items we did not serve.