Hillary Clinton Announces Plan to Boost Small Businesses

On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton announced a plan she would introduce as president to boost small businesses. She introduced her plan in an article for LinkedIn followed by a teleconference with members of the press and several small business owners. Clinton warned of Donald Trump’s past business practices with small businesses arguing that a Trump presidency would not be good for small business owners. The comprehensive plan builds on her overall economic plan which would create millions of jobs by investing in infrastructure upgrades and clean energy. Small businesses play into her overall plan as they will provide American workers and products. An outline of the plan is below and the full plan is available on The Briefing.

1. Make it easier to start a business and become profitable
   • Push states to make it faster and cheaper to start a business
   • Working with states to standardize licensing requirements
   • Making technical assistance and resources available to states
   • Provide incubators, mentoring, and training to 50,000 entrepreneurs and small business owners in underserved communities
2. Make it easier to get financing and find investors
   • Streamline regulation and cut red tape for community banks and credit unions
   • Harness the potential of online lending platforms
   • Reduce the burden of student debt by allowing entrepreneurs to defer student loan payment
   • Promote the 100% tax exclusion on capital gains for long-term small business investments
   • Expand and streamline the SBA’s Small Business Investment Company program
   • Support new innovative ways to assess creditworthiness for small business owners
   • Expand access to credit in underserved communities
   • Give the SBA administrator the authority to continue providing 7(a) loan guarantees to small businesses
   • Expand access to working capital by expanding the SBA’s working capital guarantee programs
3. Make it cheaper and faster to file taxes and pay for tax relief
   • Work to create a new standard deduction for small businesses
   • Allow 4 million small businesses with gross receipts under $1 million to take advantage of “checkbook accounting”
   • Allow small businesses to immediately expense up to $1 million in new investments
   • Quadruple the start-up tax deduction to significantly lower the cost of starting a business
4. Make it easier to offer health care and other benefits to employees
   • Simplify and expand the healthcare tax credit
   • Allow more small businesses pool together to offer retirement plans
5. Make it easier to work with the federal government
   • Work to completely revamp the digital experience for small businesses
   • Use the leverage of more than $400 billion in federal government contracting to encourage businesses to pay their suppliers in full and on time
   • Guarantee a 24-hour response time to small businesses with questions about federal regulations and access to capital programs
   • Ensure that Small Business Development Centers are placed in the highest-need communities with staff that speaks the language of local residents
   • Work to ensure that federal regulations aren’t unnecessarily holding small businesses and our economy back
   • Increase federal contracting opportunities for women-owned, minority-owned, and veteran-owned small businesses
   • Defend and strengthen the Export-Import Bank
   • Encourage small business exports by expanding SBA funding for export development
6. Make it easier to fight back when you’re getting stiffed

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News Source: LinkedIn, The Briefing, Bloomberg, Forbes

Hillary Clinton Holds Town Hall for Digital Content Creators

On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton attended two fundraisers and held a town hall event for digital content creators in Los Angeles, California. During the event, Clinton spoke about her plans to cultivate innovation and assist young people with their startups. Clinton then took questions from those in attendance and spoke about a number of topics including job creation, foreign policy alliances, and her thoughts on Republican Donald Trump.

Clinton also unveiled her Initiative on Technology & Innovation on Tuesday. While some of the details were discussed at an event earlier in the day in Denver, more details were discussed during the evening’s town hall. The extensive plan includes proposals to assist entrepreneurs, improve the technology used in the United States, update existing infrastructure, expand computer science and STEM education, protect user privacy, and make government more technologically efficient. An outline of Clinton’s proposals are below and the full details are available on The Briefing.

• Spurring entrepreneurship and innovation clusters like Silicon Valley across the country
• Allowing young entrepreneurs to defer their federal student loans for up to three years
• Connecting every household in America to high-speed internet by 2020
• Providing every student in America access to computer science education by the time they graduate
• Building the Tech Economy on Main Street
  • Providing Every Student in America an Opportunity to Learn Computer Science
  • Engaging the Private Sector to Train up to 50,000 Computer Science Teachers
  • Encouraging Local STEM Education Investments
  • Opening up the Higher Education and Job Training Landscape
  • Rebooting Job Training around Industry Needs and Job Credentials
  • Supporting Programs to Diversify the Tech Workforce
  • Spur Entrepreneurship and Innovation Clusters like Silicon Valley across the Country
  • Support Young Entrepreneurs
  • Attract and Retain the Top Talent from Around the World
  • Invest in Science and Technology R&D
  • Ensure Benefits are Flexible, Portable and Comprehensive
• Investing in World-Class Digital Infrastructure
  • Close the Digital Divide
  • Launch a “Model Digital Communities” Grant Program
  • Connect More Community Anchor Institutions to High-Speed Internet
  • Deploy 5G Wireless
• Advancing America’s Global Leadership In Tech & Innovation
  • Fight for an Open Internet Abroad
  • Promote Multi-Stakeholder Internet Governance
  • Grow American Technology Exports
  • Promote Cyber-Security
  • Safeguard the Free Flow of Information across Border
  • Update Procedures Concerning Cross-Border Requests for Data by Law Enforcement
• Setting Rules of the Road to Promote Innovation While Protecting Privacy
  • Promote Healthy Competition at the Federal, State and Local Level
  • Defend Net Neutrality
  • Improve the Patent System to Reward Innovators
  • Effective Copyright Policy
  • Commercial Data Protection
  • Protect Online Privacy as well as Security
• Engineering a Smarter and More Innovative Government
  • Make Government Simpler and More User Friendly
  • Open up More Government Data for Public Uses

A video from the town hall event is below.

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News Source: The Briefing, The Los Angeles Times