1X
The viability of small business in Hawaii was the subject of this February 1994 programme, featuring Sam Slom, head of Small Business Hawaii, and Cliff Slater, a businessman and two-time Small Businessman of the Year. The question at issue was whether Hawaii's tax and regulatory environment had become structurally hostile to small enterprise, and what reforms could reverse that. Slom argued that Hawaii led the nation in the rate of business bankruptcies, that mandated benefits — including prepaid healthcare, workers' compensation, and unemployment insurance — fell disproportionately on small firms, and that the state's prepaid health programme had not achieved its promised goals of cost containment or universal coverage. Slater agreed, contending that spending was the core problem and that services such as garbage collection and school administration should be privatised. Both argued that large businesses could pass tax increases on to consumers while small businesses could not. Slater proposed mandatory economic-impact statements on all new spending legislation. Slom maintained that small businesses, representing ninety-eight percent of the state's enterprises, had long warned of the crisis but lacked political organisation to be heard.
Transcript
Read or download the full transcript (.txt). Speaker labels were assigned automatically and may contain errors.