Small Business Employment Subsidies

[King]

This probably isn't a new idea, but it's one that popped into my head.

What if the United States government devoted... let's say... $50 billion dollars a year (conservative estimate) to a "welfare program" of sorts that subsidized new employment?  To keep things politically correct, subsidize new employment among small/medium-size business.

The system would be like this:

For every new full-time hire by a business with less than...um... 50? 100?.. full-time employees where the annual salary is at or under $100,000, the federal government will subsidize 50% of the salary for the first year.  The money would be distributed by monthly reimbursement via the Labor Department.

That's the basic idea and if executed properly it could really act as a good economic stimulus by using the unemployed to establish a pool of American-based "cheap labor" workforce.

And even if it does cost a bit of money upfront and only pays a subsidy for one year, it could potentially pay for itself and lead to more stable employment by expanding the workforce (and the tax base), take a load of people off unemployment benefits, and add more spending consumers into the economy thus causing a economic boom and allowing the businesses to be able to pay full salary with subsidy.

[Matt Damon™]

Not a bad idea. This'd help reduce the costs of running or expanding small businesses. Putting in UHC and dismanteling some of our near-feudal regulations/licensing schemes would do more to help small business than this tho.

[Mint]

I'd prefer this to the thousands of subsidies we already have.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

Certainly better than blowing hundreds of billions on large corporations that screwed up big time but are "too big to fail".

[Mint]

Not a bad idea. This'd help reduce the costs of running or expanding small businesses. Putting in UHC and dismanteling some of our near-feudal regulations/licensing schemes would do more to help small business than this tho.

Agree 100%. Also a saner, progressive tax code would help.

[Matt Damon™]

Not as anywhere near as much as putting in UHC or fixing our regulatory structure but yes.