Where the hell do you think most seed money comes from?
"Romney’s entire “best thing we can do is get out of your way” type of approach is not helpful to your average tech entrepreneur. "
The average tech entrepreneur needs to get over themselves.
Most small businesses are sole proprietorships or in some cases LLC/LLP taxed as partnership, or maybe an S corp, so individual tax rates apply. It's usually a person giving up the potential for a high W2 income (or 1099 income in some cases), taking high risk, in exchange for ongoing annual revenue after a few years.
Lower taxes (or pro-savings tax policies) allow enough capital accumulation for a plumber to set up his own plumbing business, and let a $200k/yr employee who gives up his salary to run a business and hire a few people build up capital from operating profit to expand. As a sole prop, he can't retain earnings, so he has to pay taxes on his profits every year. If he has "lumpy" income (big contract one year), this could be really difficult.
There are totally different kinds of businesses, but really, 95+% of people are going to start the self-funded (or maybe personal debt funded) operating business, not a scalable tech startup. 95% of the jobs are going to come from either tech/scalable startups or self-funded startups which become such runaway successes that they convert to scalable businesses (e.g. Walmart growing from a single store...). So, there's a good argument for tax structure to favor either type.
I also think fixing a few problems (health care, bankruptcy laws restored to pre-2005, reducing regulation/bureaucracy in hiring people, etc.) would encourage particularly the "small business" type even more than lower taxes. I don't think employers should have as much regulatory compliance requirement as they do now -- they shouldn't be collecting taxes, handling healthcare, or really anything other than focusing on their business and direct regulations in their industry (food safety for restaurants, reactor safety for nuclear plants...).
Romney just needs to write out a big fat check to every wealthy person in America and soon technology will be booming. It's so obvious!
For tech, Romney is probably marginally better than Obama. But I'm not even going to bother justifying this statement - it's irrelevant. Neither politician will have any significant effect on the tech community, and even if they did, it's a minor issue.
Lets focus on a major issue: >500k people just like me (drug users) are sitting in jail right now for no good reason. For those who are unfamiliar, sitting in jail is far worse than being unemployed or having marginally fewer pinterest clones.
Another major issue is the fact that millions of people from the poorest places on earth (I'm not talking about wealthy nations like Mexico here) could be lifted from poverty. The vast majority (i.e., >95%) of India lives in what would be considered dire poverty in the US. Upper class individuals in the poshest suburbs of Mumbai suffer living conditions comparable to the poorest housing projects in the US. All we need to do to lift them from poverty is allow them to enter the US and provide us cheap medical services, clean our houses and the like.
So yeah, one of the politicians is marginally better than the other on an issue that neither of them have much control over. Why do we even care?
The Indian upper class (doctors, nurses, developers) are poor by US standards. They can become wealthy simply by allowing them to change location. This would benefit us too, as would allowing the poor to come over and sell us cheap house cleaning or dosa preparation services.
Another example: there are about 90k Somalians in the US, mostly refugees from Somalia's earlier troubles. Assuming they have a GDP per capita half the US average, Somalian Americans have a GDP of about $2B. That's about 1/3 the GDP of all of Somalia (approx $6B, pop 10M).
Do you really believe the JOBS Act (the only concrete action the OP attributes to Obama) even comes remotely close to having such an effect?
Also, if I haven't misread your post, you seem to imply that we should be bringing in these folks as cheap labor to "elevate" them...there's something vaguely off-putting about that remark.
That's because you are viewing it through the lens of status rather than economics. I'm not proposing to raise anyone's status, I'm simply proposing to give them the opportunity to earn for themselves 24/7 running water and electricity, decent housing, schools for their children (where the teachers actually show up), etc.
I'm also not proposing fixing the rest of the world. I'm proposing helping millions of people at a net benefit to ourselves.
Are you seriously arguing that making a few wealthy Appalachians even wealthier is a bigger issue than making millions of poor people wealthy and the rest of us even wealthier?
I am getting mixed signals from both major parties though: http://www.dailytech.com/Democratic+Senators+Block+Republica...
http://www.businessinsider.com/conservative-legislators-are-...
Of course, that ignores the fact that the electoral college vote (NOT the popular vote) decides the results.
In the long run, I think I'd take the worst of the D/R candidates over a string of 8 consecutive elections if the consequence is ending the two party stranglehold.
The way the system works, without proportional representation, you probably will ultimately end up with two parties, but I'd rather replace both current parties with new competent-but-ideologically-distinct parties (like, say, a Green/Socialist/Union/Interventionist/etc. party vs. a Libertarian/Free-Market/Business/Isolationist party).
If your primary concern is the tech sector and entrepreneurs then the choices are pretty woeful.
The Obama administration is without doubt the most hostile to the tech sector through and the Internet its strong pro-IP stance between:
- staffing the DoJ with RIAA lawyers [1]
- appointing RIAA lobbyists as federal judges [2]
- having an anaemic stance on software patents ("don't blame us") [3] since the White House is by far the largest bully pulpit in the country they could act if they wanted to. It is within the power of Congress and the White House to reform the American Appeals Court for the Federal Circuit, which is responsible for a lot of software patent nonsense and, at this point, is arguably an example of regulatory capture
- only came out against SOPA/PIPA when public backlash had already basically killed them [4] [5]
- tried to negotiate and pass the original ACTA treaty in secret, which would have largely equated piracy with terrorism [6]
- used diplomatic pressure on foreign governments to tow the same hardline IP stance eg the AFACT downloading case against iiNet in Australia (which was ultimately lost) [7]
- enacted the America Invents Act, which gives patents to the first-to-file [8]
Romney has been essentially silent on the issue of software patents and, let's face it, he's the off-cycle dud candidate of this election. By this I mean look at the candidates that went up against the incumbent seeking reelection:
2004: John Kerry
1996: Bob Dole
1992: Clinton obviously won against Bush Sr but this was in large part to Ross Perot more than anything else (IMHO)
1984: Walter Mondale
Anyway, if the tech sector concerns you--and since you're reading HN it probably does--the choices are terrible this time around. Software patents threaten the entire tech sector [1]: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/04/obama-taps-fift/
[2]: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/03/riaa-lobbyist-bec...
[3]: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/11/white-house-blame...
[4]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/18/sopa-obama-donors-h...
[5]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/johngaudiosi/2012/01/16/obama-sa...
[6]: http://boingboing.net/2009/11/03/secret-copyright-tre.html
[7]: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/31/afact_subcontractor_...
[8]: http://macdailynews.com/2011/09/16/obama-signs-first-to-file...
That was not hostile to the tech sector. First to file vs. first to invent is neither favorable to nor unfavorable to the tech sector, and the AIA contains some strong anti-troll provisions which are quite favorable to the tech sector.
First-to-file only matters when you have two parties eligible for the same conflicting patentable idea. It does not create some new gold rush of patentability; it applies only in the tiny minority of cases where two people are filing conflicting patents simultaneously. It's possible that there hasn't been a single widely-known trolled patent that was obtained under these kinds of circumstances.
MEANWHILE: AIA also includes provisions that prevent trolls from joining together defendants in suits into a single case in the troll's jurisdiction. Since that was a major part of the litigation M.O. for patent trolls, it's hard to look at AIA as a win for trolls.
Do you feel as though IP does not have any place in technology? Curious to here your take.
Dont know if I would agree with you about the of cycle dud candidate. I see your point, just seems like the polls show that this wont be a landslide. I think (thought?) Romney had a realistic chance at winning.
But Bush Jr was vulnerable in 2004. Hell he probably only won in 2000 because Gore himself was a dud candidate. Anyway, two things contributed to the 2004 reelection: John Kerry being an out-of-touch dandy and playboy and the gay marriage referenda (which were a call-to-arms to the religious right).
This time around Obama is vulnerable too. A lot of people are disenchanted him over, for example, Iraq (still going on). Look at the difference in rhetoric between Obama the candidate and Obama the president. World of difference.
My view is you need to understand that each party understands who their bases are.
The Republican base is the religious right, corporations and the wealthy.
The Democrat base is unions, the poor, African-Americans and... trial lawyers [1]. It's why you see the Democrats fight, for example, tort reform [2] [3] [4].
Lawyers love patents, which is why you'll never see patent reform from the Democratic Party. Things is, big corporations love them too so you'll never see it from the Republican Party either. But at least patents may hurt companies enough to notice at some point. A lot of tech companies are against software patents.
Personally, I am 100% against software patents in any form. The idea, to paraphrase John Carmack, that I can write a program and then someone else can independently write that same program and violate any number of my patents is horrifying. The fact that any given smartphone may contain and/or violate hundreds if not thousands of patents tells you the system is broken.
Patents are intended to protect innovation but it seems clear it does the opposite. Patents on aviation in the early 20th century left the US unable to build planes when it entered World War One, to the point that it had to buy them from France and Congress needed to intervene [5].
[1]: http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202473540921&Tria...
[2]: http://voices.yahoo.com/democrats-against-tort-reform-regard...
[3]: http://citizenwells.wordpress.com/2012/07/30/obamacare-and-n...
[4]: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230383020457744...
[5]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wright_brothers_patent_war
I don't know what other people are paying, but it costs us up to $1500/m if an employee has a family to provide decent insurance in CA.
But... I don't really see that ever happening without a complete overhaul of the healthcare system.
