Barack Obama on Business Issues

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Taking a look at Barack Obama’s campaign website, there’s a whole list of issues that Obama feels are crucial: Healthcare, Iraq, Social Security, Ethics. The closest you might find to business issues, though is a brief overview on economic issues, further broken down into the following:

• Provide Middle Class Americans Tax Relief
• Trade
• Technology, Innovation and Creating Jobs
• Labor
• Protect Homeownership and Crack Down on Mortgage Fraud
• Address Predatory Credit Card Practices
• Reform Bankruptcy Laws
• Work/Family Balance

But don’t worry! Obama has a plan for small business — even if it’s buried deep within his website. The key component of Obama’s plan is, predictably, health care: he wants to offer small businesses the opportunity to buy into a low-cost health care plan if they’re willing to cover their employees. And rather than Clinton’s vague promise to double the funding of the Small Business Administration, Obama has laid out the specifics of what he would do with the SBA as President: he’d specifically up the funding available to the SBA to offer loans to individuals in the process of setting up their businesses. He also wants to focus on establishing business incubators with the end goal of creating more jobs.

Whether or not Obama’s plan is the best option for business owners in the coming election, it seems far more thought out than what we saw from Clinton. Rather than bolstering minority-owned businesses with government contracts, Obama seems to be focusing on the infrastructure necessary to grow small businesses: loans that can be difficult to obtain from banks, technology (like broadband internet access) and opportunities to learn the skills necessary to operate a small business from either business incubators or the SBA.

Obama’s three page plan is available to download as a PDF.