This will likely come off as whining, but one thing about being self-employed that's taken some getting-used-to is taxes. Not the actual check-writing part so much*. Just the fact that I have to go through all the rigamarole more than once a year now. And, sadly, I'm even pretty diligent about record-keeping, so it's not like it's a desperate, chaotic scramble to pull all the info. together.
But even irritation over busywork pales in comparison to the hypocrisy of our (nominally) elected (so-called) leaders. I'd take politicians rather more seriously if they'd stop pretending that they're geared for any business smaller than a global giga-corporation.
Sure, if you employ other people, regular filings are pretty much required to keep everything on the up-and-up. Fair enough. Heck, I would object much less to even quarterly
filings if they didn't expect psychic powers. Having to compute
quarterly revenues/expenses fifteen to sixteen days before the quarter is even over is what burns my bacon.
The point is that a freelancer doesn't get to the point of being able to hire other people without slack. Slack is somewhat easier to come by without having to drop everything for inane paperwork four times a year, spank you very much.
So, yeah. Politicians--if you can spare time from your punishing treadmill of ribbon-cutting and baby-kissing and back-slapping and deal-making and poll-watching--howsabout you wrap your brains around the simple notion that businesses generally start small?
Garage small.
Spare bedroom small.
Dorm room small.
Look. I know you want to take credit for the next Irving or Radian6 or Clarity or whatever. But it's more likely to happen if I'm not wasting hours of my otherwise billable time with redundant paperwork. And especially not when Freddy and Ottawa are taking their cut of my revenue before it's even in the bank.
You say you want a business-oriented environment and jobs, Jobs, JOBS. I say put up or shut up. Get just a teeeeensy bit real (for once) about what it's like here in solopreneur land. You want to do one thing to bootstrap the next big thing? Let solopreneurs file once a year on April 30th and let them take care of business the other ~364.242 days of the year. Then maybe--just maybe--I might not roll my eyes at your platitudes and bandwagon-jumping quite so much, m'kay?
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* Although the cost of banking is another (cough!) "privilege" (cough!) of being in business for yourself that no one warns you about. Going by the price, the paperstock of business cheques is made exclusively from wood culled from ancient elven forests before being artisanally hand-pulped by craftspeople whose oral history does not even know of a time before they were wood-pulpers. Then the printing-plate for each cheque is hand-engraved by printers selectively bred from the direct descendants both Johannes Gutenberg and Aldus Manutius before being inked with Soviet-stockpiled 1970s-vintage IBM Selectric typewriter ribbons reconstituted by unicorn tears. (Sadly, that's the most rational explanation I have for the cost differential.)
