Ginsburg pointed to $850,000 worth of new machinery he acquired with cash available through tax savings. He said he was able to win new work for his roughly 85 employees and rehire workers laid off last year.

Bennet used the case to try to give shape to policies he has supported as a senator this year. In talking with reporters, he sought to pull discussion about business down from the static and abstract realm of left-right political cliches.

“What I don’t believe is good for Colorado and for our families is a bunch of talking points and theoretical policies invented by right-wing Washington think tanks. What I do think is good for Colorado are the practical discussions arising from people like Noel… and that’s what I’m fighting for in Washington,” he said.

The small business legislation set aside $30 billion to fund loans and put in place eight immediate tax cuts amounting to $12 billion. The tax cuts include a “accelerated depreciation” $500,000 new-equipment write off, zero capital gains tax for small-business investors, a $10,000 deduction of start-up costs, and 100 percent tax deduction on the cost of health insurance for entrepreneurs.

Bennet was surprised to learn that InterTech had already benefited from the accelerated depreciation provision of the bill. “Excellent,” he said to Ginsburg while swinging his fist across his chest. “That’s awesome.”

“That part of the bill [allows] small business owners buying heavy equipment to expense the cost– to write down that expense more quickly– which is a way of allowing them to enjoy more cash flow, so that they can actually run their business…. What happened here is exactly what we were trying to do.”

Ginsburg, a supporter of education initiatives who knew Bennet when Bennet headed the Denver Public School system, said that one of InterTech’s large longtime customers last year closed its plant in Colorado and relocated to Mexico, forcing layoffs at InterTech. Recently InterTech won a large contract from a new customer but had to buy new machinery to do the work.

“Credit is still very difficult to get. It’s been a real struggle to grow because the capital just isn’t there yet. We used the money we would have paid in taxes to invest in the business. ”

Ginsburg said it pained him to watch day after day this year as lawmakers in Washington faced off on crucial legislation while the recession and collapsed financial markets strangled business.

“Watching the depreciation bill keep getting delayed… what hurt was that for political reasons we weren’t doing things to move the country forward,” he said.

Ginsburg launched InterTech 30 years ago as a school project when he attended the University of Denver. He lamented political policies he believes have strangled his industry ever since. He said up to 60 percent of the plastics molding industry in Colorado has moved away.

“That great sucking sound has pulled jobs to China and Mexico for decades,” he said, referencing anti-Nafta 1990s independent presidential candidate Ross Perot. “Fair trade only makes sense up to a point. How about free and fair trade? Now that makes sense.”

“The more we outsource our jobs, there’s not going to be anyone left to pay for the products we manufacture. There has to be balance and integrity in the debate. It’s the biggest lie we’ve been telling our country for the last 10 to 15 years: ‘I’m gonna lower your taxes and it’s going to trickle down.’ It didn’t trickle down.”

Bennet’s GOP opponent in the neck-and-neck race for his Senate seat, Weld County DA Ken Buck, opposed the small-business bill. Although his campaign didn’t return messages, some Congressional Republicans argued against the bill by saying that small businesses would benefit more from spending cuts and an extension of the Bush-era tax cuts. Others cast the loan fund provision as another bank bailout, saying it would lead to risky loans.

Bennet dismissed assertions that Democrats, by supporting policies for instance that raise renewable energy standards, are unduly interfering in the market and unfairly “choosing winners and losers” in business. He said the government has been choosing winners and losers for a long time at the expense of American workers.

“The current tax code gives companies that ship jobs overseas a tax benefit. It allows them to write off the cost of shutting plants here in the United States…. Those are the kind of things we need to fix in order to make sure we’ve got manufacturing jobs here in Colorado and all across the country. We’ve been asleep at the switch the last ten years.”

“The current tax code reflects a lot of incumbent interests… not the interests of innovators, not the entrepreneurs for the 21st century. [Republicans] want tax breaks for the very largest multinational corporations.”

Bennet said the current dominant political frame, where the Republican Party is seen as pro-business low-tax party and the Democratic Party as the anti-business high-tax party is a “false narrative.”

“I’m the only person in this race with any business experience at all and that’s the way I approach these questions.

“There are television ads running against me that say I raised taxes. But 98 percent of Coloradans got tax cuts since the time I’ve been in the Senate and a lot of those are small business tax cuts. The [depreciation] bill represented $12 billion of tax cuts for small businesses… The likelihood of that new piece of equipment being on the floor here [at Intertech ] without that tax cut is pretty remote, and certainly [InterTech's] cash flow has benefited as a result of the bill.

“So the narrative is a false narrative. What you are seeing, I think, is a Washington that is broken because there are a whole bunch of backward-looking special interests holding up progress because the current economic incentives in the tax code and other places benefit them to the detriment of our smaller businesses, our innovators, and ultimately to the detriment of the American people.

“The choice in this election is blindingly clear,” he said. “It’s between someone who wants to work shoulder to shoulder with people like Noel or someone who wants to perpetuate the same policies that have resulted in this incredible economic drain the country has faced.

“Having a set of tax policies that inspire people to do exactly what you’re seeing InterTech do here will make us more competitive.”

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Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-La., center) and Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich., right) are crafting a bill to increase lending to small businesses. (Pete Marovich/ZUMApress.com)

Now, residents of Bloomingdale — east of the U Street corridor, near Howard University — could use some businesses. There is Windows Market, which sells sandwiches and groceries; Big Bear, a popular coffee shop; and Timor Bodega, an organic grocer. But the closest place to grab brunch or a drink after work is a fifteen-minute walk away. “There’s just tremendous pent-up demand,” John Salatti, the neighborhood commissioner, says. “I couldn’t imagine how well a business would do if it could just open up.”

But the problem for Bloomingdale is that it just cannot get businesses to open up. It is not for a lack of trying. In the past year, at least half a dozen restaurants have attempted to set up shop in one of the neighborhood’s empty storefronts. There is the sandwich and pizza place attempting to move in next to the Howard dorm and the fancy new condo building. There is the neighborhood tavern trying to open near the yoga studio. There is the restaurant that wants to take over the old fire house. Not one has succeeded.

Consider, for instance, the case of Aleks Duni. He owns Veranda, a Greek restaurant in the Shaw neighborhood, as well as Heller’s Bakery and Marx Cafe in Mount Pleasant. The three small businesses together employ nearly 40 people and did well even during the worst of the recession. Duni set out to open a pizza restaurant on the main drag in Bloomingdale. He scouted out a location and secured the necessary permits, even getting a liquor license and thus a guarantee of good revenue. Now, no bank will lend him the $50,000 he needs to finish the job. “It is only a matter of getting the money,” Duni says. “If I did, I could be open in a month.”

Duni approached four banks about securing the loan to finish construction and open the doors. Each one said no. “There are a million reasons they give,” Duni says. “The first of them is that credit has been reduced.” Now, he says, he is concerned about continuing to apply for loans just to be denied. “If you apply and you don’t get the loan, your credit score goes down,” he notes. Frustrated, he has even sought the help of the Small Business Administration, the government agency. “They had nothing for me,” he says. “I don’t need to know what the loan requirements are. And the SBA cannot give me a loan.”

Duni is one of millions of frustrated small-business owners, who represent a lost opportunity for economic recovery and a major concern for the Obama administration. Over the past 15 years, two-thirds of the new jobs created in the United States were created by a small business. Small businesses, like big businesses, require loans to grow and hire new employees. But unlike their medium and large counterparts, small businesses are still hobbled by frozen credit markets. Lending remains on the wane despite the Obama administration throwing tens of millions of dollars at the problem. An SBA initiative to back loans has worked, but only on a limited scale. Most Main Street banks continue to decrease funding to small businesses, allergic to the higher risks they pose.

Small businesses generally use commercial banks and finance companies for loans, and those lenders have continued to cut back their books even as the recession has started to lift. Commercial and industrial lending — the economic category that includes small-business loans — fell 20 percent in 2009 and declined a further four percent in the first three months of 2010. In January, the latest month for which data is available, nine big banks provided 28 percent less credit to small businesses than the month before, the Treasury Department reports.

A recent report by the National Federation of Independent Businesses, a small-business lobbying organization, underscores the point. The NFIB found that in 2009, 20 percent fewer businesses held a loan or credit line than in 2008. Just 40 percent of small-business owners that applied for a loan had “all of their credit needs met,” down from nearly 90 percent five years ago. The continued seizure of the credit markets is reducing small-business hiring and confidence, NFIB argues. Its index of small business optimism actually fell in March, with most businesses saying they had a gloomy outlook and did not feel it would be a good time to expand.

The underlying economic problem is twofold. First, banks claim that they do not have enough funds to lend to small businesses. Second, banks with funds are unwilling to take the risk of lending to small businesses, since they tend to default at higher rates. The Obama administration has tackled both problems with a spate of bills and initiatives. The two main ones include: a $730 million infusion of funding to the SBA, letting it increase government loan-backing to 90 percent and reduce fees, enacted last spring; and $17.5 billion in tax cuts, credits, and subsidies aimed in part at small businesses in the jobs bill passed last month.

These efforts have successfully boosted SBA lending back to pre-crisis levels. “Once the recovery act passed in February 2009, provisions went to the SBA to let us increase our guarantee immediately,” Hayley Matz of the SBA explains. “Since then, lending has increased 90 percent. We’re where we were. We’re at 2007 levels.” But the SBA is not a direct lender — and credit markets outside of the SBA’s control have remained frozen solid. “There is bipartisan support for SBA has done and acknowledgment that our recovery programs have been good,” Matz says. “The next step is not just to continue with what works.”

The administration is thus now pushing a stronger set of provisions to entice lenders to extend credit to small businesses in a bill currently being assembled under the watch of Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who heads the Senate Small Business Committee. The bill includes various tax breaks, including an exemption for earnings from small-business stock. But its centerpiece is a Treasury program to redirect $30 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program to community banks.

Still, small business advocates say it is too little, and too late. “We sure would have liked to have seen quicker action,” says Terry Gardner, policy director at the advocacy group Small Business Majority. “Like so many issues, these proposals are just bogged down. With the SBA loans, I had to ask — who is actually against this? Why is this still not moving? It has bipartisan and presidential support, plus support from banks and small business groups. It is frustrating.”

Moreover, he says that it is not clear if the administration plans will effectively convince banks to lend to small businesses. “The Treasury proposal providing more capital to community banks is only a good idea if it actually induces them to make loans,” Gardner says. “There has to be some incentive structure that guarantees that taxpayer money being loaned to these banks is accomplishing its purpose — to get more capital to small businesses to create jobs — because efforts to do that have stalled.”

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Video after the jump.

As debate over every topic raised since Obama has taken office has demonstrated, there are no agreed upon facts. There are no facts that can be agreed upon. There are no givens. There is no consensus on the most basic sets of numbers. These are Bennet’s. He’s attempting to set a base on which discussion can build. A for effort. GOP feeder institute Heritage Foundation no doubt has an entirely different and competing set of base numbers.

Mr. President, the median income in Colorado has actually declined by $800 over the last 10 years. At the same time, the cost of health insurance has gone up by 97%. It has doubled over that period of time and that has happened all over the country. This slide shows the difference between the rate of the increase of wages in my state from 2000 to 2007 versus the rate of the increase in insurance.
 
I have talked to small business people all across the state of Colorado and they’ve said they’re trying to continue to insure their employees just as they had for generations in family owned businesses, but they’re finding that they have to make a tradeoff between people’s wages because the cost of insurance is getting so large. By 2016, in my state, working families in Colorado are going to be spending roughly 40% of their income on health care if we don’t change the status quo.

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Not only was there a larger story that was completely missed but the articles perpetuated myths about health care access with nary a whimper of fact-checking.

Rep. Musgrave chairs the U.S. House Subcommittee on Workforce, Empowerment and Government Programs. During her year-long tenure as subcommittee chair she has conducted only one hearing on health care issues for small business.

That hearing – Healthcare and Small Business: Proposals That Will Help Lower Costs and Cover the Uninsured – was held on April 27, 2006 in Washington, DC and included testimony only from proponents of the Bush Administration’s plan to promote Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), tax write-offs for small business, and malpractice litigation award caps. The “fact-finding” hearing was limited to business association lobbyists, a coalition of bankers and firms that stand to make billions of dollars on HSA management, and the chairman of the American Medical Association.

Likewise, the Loveland hearing was limited to small business owners who are not providing health benefits to their employees, an insurance agent who supports HSAs, and a doctor advocating for malpractice reform. Nearly all the comments duplicated the testimony at the April hearing in Washington and again espouse The White House’s proposal. Nancy Billica, who heads Health Care for All Colorado, an educational and research non-profit organization on health care reform, was not invited to attend the local hearing as a witness. “I didn’t even know anything about it,” said Billica.

Advancing Myths
One of the most egregious problem in both articles’ coverage of the hearing was the lack of critical analysis on Health Savings Accounts which have been thoroughly debunked as a panacea for improving health care access.

The non-partisan Center of Budget and Policy Priorities has written extensively about HSAs. The Center contends that HSAs would actually increase the number of uninsured Americans, now estimated at 46 million, and drive up the price of insurance by splitting the risk pool into wealthy-healthy and poor-unhealthy individuals. The proposed tax breaks would also go to wealthier families who need the least help paying for health insurance. And, as always, offering federal tax shelters without off-setting the lost revenue means higher budget deficits.

Yet, none of those issues were raised at all in the local media coverage.

The Backstory
Health Savings Accounts are tax-favorable savings accounts for individuals with high-deductible health insurance policies that can be withdrawn to pay for out-of-pocket medical expenses, such as co-payments or uncovered services.

Critics of HSAs and the current proposal to increase both the tax benefits and amount of money which can be saved toward medical expenses point to numerous policy studies that state the accounts are completely ineffective for expanding health care access or lowering the cost of insurance premiums – the two biggest problems faced by Americans in getting medical care.

Instead, HSAs have been described as boon to the banking and financial sector which holds and invests the savings accounts for their own profit. Even by one of their own lobbyists.

Dan Perrin, the publisher of H.S.A. Insider and executive director of the H.S.A. Coalition, a lobbying group backed by 70 small-business and medical industry groups as well as the American Bankers Association, and one of the witnesses in the April Capitol Hill hearing, was quoted by The New York Times in a January 27, 2006 article:

Billions of dollars that used to be written in the form of checks with insurance companies’ names on them will instead go to credit unions, banks, and long-term investment houses. You know America: you see a financial opportunity and it sets off a gold rush.