The Heritage Foundation’s Ed Feulner attempt to justify extending the Bush tax cuts by helping small business (“Stop squeezing small business with high taxes”, Sept. 6) is like trying to convince your town to repave all of your roads because you found a few potholes across town. It is grossly inefficient, ridiculous overkill, and benefits a large number of people when a targeted program would better accomplish the same goal.

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative “think tank” trying to make policy that benefits the wealthy elite sound mainstream, is behind this gross distortion.

I’ve owned a number of small business in my life and work for one right now. Let me assure you that small businesses have concerns for payroll taxes, workers’ compensation rates and health insurance costs, but the income tax is barely on the radar.

Even Mr. Feulner admits that only 8 percent of small-business owners are in the highest two tax brackets so the other 92 percent really wouldn’t see a sizeable difference in their taxes.

Even if we focus on the 8 percent of business owners in the top two brackets, he’s crazy if he thinks that a small-business owner who would have made $200,000 would act any differently now that she’ll make only $194,000. The 3.6 percent increase at the top rate (only taxing the last dollars) isn’t enough to even consider when making decisions on a day-to-day basis. He obviously has never owned a small business.

Why give all the wealthy elite a tax break in order to help only a small percentage of the business owners? It would be tremendously more efficient and effective to target a tax break, something Obama is currently trying to do.

The reality is that Mr. Feulner and the Heritage Foundation couldn’t give two hoots about helping small-business owners, they are just trying to convince us to continue the massive tax give-away to the wealthy elite that we cannot afford.

Don’t fall for this smoke and mirrors trick. Let’s restore the mildly higher tax rates on the wealthy elite that led to a healthy economy and budget surpluses under Clinton and then use a small portion of this new revenue for a targeted tax break to help small business. Much smarter!