Jim Blasingame

Business futurist, award-winning author, speaker and columnist

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Archives for March 2021

It’s Never Smart To Raise Taxes On Small Businesses

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During the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden regularly promised to raise taxes. Here are quotes candidate Biden made between his convention acceptance speech and election day on how and why he would raise taxes if he became president.

“I will raise taxes for anybody making over $400,000,” Biden said. “It’s about time the very wealthy should pay a fair share … corporations should pay a fair share.”

He continued, “It’s smart to tax businesses … making excessive amounts of money … and paying no taxes.”

And when asked about taxing small businesses and individuals, without any sense of shame for being so obtuse about the sector representing half of the U.S. economy and signing the front of 100 million paychecks, Biden said: “No one would have a tax increase who earns less than $400,000 annually.”

When Joe Biden made those promises last year, small business owners believed him. Three days before the election, our November 3, 2020 survey of Main Street operators revealed more than three-fourths of our respondents were not going to vote for Biden. And now, barely two months into his first term, the new president is making plans to make good on his “tax the rich” promise. 

But there’s a giant defect in Biden’s plan: His metric for where to start taxing the very wealthy and corporations lands hard on small business families.

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The Best Of Times, The Worst Of Times

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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

In his preamble of A Tale of Two Cities, the immortal Charles Dickens delivered an appraisal of the disruptive state of affairs in 18th-century London and Paris. Today, seeking perspective for the past 12 months, Dickens’ perfectly paradoxical passage continues to serve – our heads nodding resolutely as his 19th-century words overlay our 21st-century reality.

Let’s employ Dickens’ literary device in pursuit of our own perspective on America’s currently disruptive state-of-affairs. 

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As The CEO, You’re The Futurist Of Your Company

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“For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.” – John F. Kennedy

Was America’s 35th president encouraging each of us to be a futurist? Some people dismiss that term as pretentious and stuffy, but as a small business owner, holding that attitude will hold you back. Because as the CEO, being the futurist of your company is your most important assignment.

To be a futurist, you don’t need a fancy education, nor do you have to be a genius. Futurists aren’t inspired by God, they’re not clairvoyant, psychic, or have ESP. But they do look at the world differently than everyone else. Futurists see things others don’t because they’re looking for those things.

Perhaps it will help to introduce the product of a futurist, which is foresight. A futurist’s job is to deliver foresight to an audience. As a small business futurist, your audience is made up of four groups that need to believe in your vision for the future of the enterprise: family, employees, customers, and bankers – in that order.

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Don’t Drag A Stinking Fish Across Your Future

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For centuries, one of the great pastimes of the English landed gentry was foxhunting. Part of that fun involved the occasional need to distract the hounds away from the scent they’d been following, which was accomplished by dragging a red herring – a real fish on a string – across the trail of the little furry guy.

Since this smelly practice was essentially lying to the hounds by leading them in a false direction, in time it produced a handy and enduring metaphor. Today, instead of being associated with horses, dogs, and stuffy English nobility in red coats, a “red herring” is more likely to represent someone attempting to divert attention from the real issue at hand in a conversation, debate, or negotiation. Magicians call it sleight-of-hand, and politicians call it politics. My grandmother would have called it lying.

Sorry, Grandma, but there are examples when introducing a red herring into a conversation doesn’t have to be sinister. For example, in a negotiation, it can be a handy defensive tactic, and in sales, it can confirm how important an objection really is to a prospect.

But there are other conversations when we introduce a red herring without realizing it – the ones we have with ourselves. And in those cases, since we know both sides of the debate, the result is what Grandma said: we lie to ourselves. I call that the personal red herring. It’s one thing to use red herrings as a communication tool, but when we use them on ourselves, it’s unproductive at best and disastrous at worst.

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