Why not put my 2 cents in ? Here are a few notes that hopefully a couple politicians will take note of:

1. Carried Interest Taxes

Of course it should be taxed at normal income rates because that is what it is.  But the bigger issue is the misrepresentation that it will negatively impact investment. That firms will not put as much capital to work because of the higher tax rates. To this I have one word, “nonsense”.  What else do you think people who run Funds are going to do, work at Dairy Queen ? Get a job at a bank ? Fund managers get in the game because its an opportunity to make huge sums of money.  No one is going to look at their business and say “Since I might make only $60mm instead of $80mm , I’m out. ” Doesn’t matter if its 60mm, 6mm or 600k.  Fund managers always come from somewhere else because starting and running Funds  is a chance to make a lot more money.  They left jobs paying income taxes and they can deal with paying income taxes on their fund earnings.

2. Banks Loaning  Money to Startups does not Create Jobs

One of the keys to failure in starting a business is borrowing startup funds.  Why ? Because startups never work on a schedule and loans always have to be paid back on schedule. It’s a huge mistake to borrow money from a bank to get a business going, yet our politicians seem to think that more bank lending to startups is a key to creating new jobs. It’s not. In fact, banks are smart enough to realize that unless they can pawn the loan onto someone else, like the Small Business Association, there is no good reason to loan a startup money.  Bank loans to startups are job killers, not creators.

3. The Y-Combinator Model is the key to Massive Job Creation

The best way way to create jobs in this economy  ? Follow the Y-Combinator model and make all equity investments up to 250k dollars and held for at least 3 years tax free when sold. If you aren’t familiar with how Paul Graham and his competitors do things, you should be. They truly are the ones creating jobs.  Speaking for myself, I have invested 250k or less in 8 or so businesses (some are still in process) in the last 12 months.  Now I personally would have done it with or with out a tax break, but the way our economy works, with everyone hacking tax regulations, a tax break will push more people in this direction. The more NON RECOURSE money available to startups, the more startups and jobs created and the more likely a huge employer emerges.

Not only is there a chance a large company is built, there is a chance that the “next big thing” emerges and catches fire, leading to hundreds of thousands of jobs or more being created.  I’m hoping that our politicians realize that LUCK is the key to getting unemployment back under 5pct. It’s going to take luck for someone to create the idea that we all missed and use angel funding from a source like Y Combinator to turn it into a company(s) that accelerate the economy much like The Internet and the PC Revolution did.  If my memory serves me, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Marc Andreeson weren’t out looking for loans from banks to start their companies.  They used relatively small amounts of friends and family money. Make those investments tax free and we stand a chance to see the next generation Dell and Gates emerge.

(and no, this isn’t contradictory to my carry interest position. The investors should get the tax break, not the people who take a percentage of the profits (the carry interest) the investors would otherwise get paid).

3a. The Mobile Boom Could be a Unique Economic Catalyst if:

The boom in mobile devices and applications is reminiscent  of the mid 80s when we had software developers and applications popping up left and right.  Faster processors and regular operating system improvements created the same vibrant software ecosystem back then that we are seeing right now (Windows is to Mac in 1985 as Android  Apps is to IPhone/IPad Apps in 2010). Which in turn created new jobs and even new industries.

Now is the time to encourage more of the same through tax breaks for small investments and extended holding periods in startups.  We may also want to consider encouraging the creation of new Investment Banks that take small to medium size companies public.  There has been so much consolidation and contamination in Investment Banking that no one wants to waste time on the $5mm dollar IPO. Yet that is just what the economy needs to create jobs.

The public markets were once designed to showcase and raise capital for up and coming, exciting companies. Now the only IPOs seem to be  chinese companies and the re-flating of highly leveraged Private Equity deals. Selling stock to the public can not only create capital for the company, but it creates visibility as well. When we made the decision to take Broadcast.com public in 1998, we recognized that it was an important capital raise for us, but that it also was an important marketing event as well.  Creating national recognition and public shareholder participation through IPOs is a missing link in revitalizing the economy. And who knows, maybe we will get lucky again and there will be a small  bubble in a new technology  that takes us out of the depths of this recession and accelerates recovery.

I’ve written multiple times about the value of independence from Google to Newspapers. Of course, each generated responses from many who disagreed with me.   I just wanted to point out that Facebook, arguably  the largest and most important website in the world has most of its content walled off from Google.

In fact, the biggest loser in the Facebook  privacy debate is not Facebook, it’s Google. Why ? Because the more people that put all their status updates, information and pictures behind a wall of privacy, the fewer status updates available to google (and other search engines as well).  The net result is that Google’s mission to index all the world’s information has been irreparably damaged.  500mm Facebook users and most of what they all publish to their networks is unavailable.  There is probably more information being published by FB users than on blogs, and possibly even more unique content than is published by all newspapers in aggregate. Thats a lot of the world’s information that is not available to Google.

If Facebook can choose to offer no more than basic profile information and the status updates of users that opt-in, why shouldn’t newspapers do the same thing ? Offer its headlines (status updates) to Google, and then let those who want more information click through to the newspaper site. Once the user gets to their site, the newspaper can decide whether they want a login (Facebook Connect ? ahh the irony) and/or want to charge for access, or just give free and open access to the content. It’s their business decision.

Disconnecting from Google hasn’t hurt Facebook, why shouldn’t newspapers do the same thing?

But wait there is more.

There is a wholesale change occurring in how we acquire information. In the past, if we were looking for a new restaurant in our home town, the score of a game or news headlines we may do a search to get information. Now, as the commercial says, “There is an app for that”. Just download the app that lists the restaurants, points of interest, museums, news, sports scores whatever you are interested in to your app enabled device of choice.  If there isn’t an app for it today, there will be.  If you carry an Apple or Android (owned and offered for free by Google) enabled device just look at how your information discovery and consumption habits have changed.  Do you search more or less?  Do you now get information from Apps that you used to get in search results ? Of course you do.

All that information in all those apps on all those devices, as well as the discovery steps you take to get that information are all hidden from Google (at least on the IPhone and non Android platforms, which may be why Android is free and available to all in an effort to counterbalance this problem). Worse for google, with companies like Urban Airship and Superfeedr.com, more and more real time updates are being delivered exclusively to apps, independent of the device operating system  and not being posted on the web.

Bottom line,   Facebook and mobile apps have shown that there is life without Google, newspapers should recognize this as an opportunity and get their apps out and rethink how they make their information available to Google.