You’re a guy who’s been working in Human Resources sales – basically selling labor – for your whole career.  You match up companies that are looking for contract labor – everything from office temps to database analysts – and you’ve been doing it your entire career.

You just got a bigger, better idea; start your own business.  So you took your life’s savings, and a book full of contacts, and hung out your own shingle as a software staff augmentation vendor – basically a temp service for software engineers.

You worked 12 hour days, and weekends, working your book of contacts, in a competitive market full of some very big players (including the tech services branches of some national players, like Robert Half and Manpower).  Each of those people takes work,  – HR paperwork, keeping up contact with them and their hiring managers – on top of your sales efforts which, in this economy, are a lot of work.

But your efforts, after several years of building a name and a rolodex, are paying off.  Your company has a solid name and reputation, , and have managed to have an average of 10-15 of “your” people working at companies around the area.   And this yields, after years of working very hard, about $250,000 a year for your efforts.  Figure that translates into an Adjusted Gross Income of $220,000 – you rack up a lot of business expenses.

And because you have managed to pull that off – especially in this economy – the Minnesota DFL and Mark Dayton believe that rather than the roughly  $17,600 of your income the state currently appropriates, they should take $24090.   That’s an extra $6,490 that the state believes would be better spent on its’ clerks’ defined-benefit pensions (you pay for your own IRA), and on light rail trains you’ll never ride (because your customers aren’t on Hiawatha or University, or even largely in Minneapolis or Saint Paul, for some reason), or on the pages and pages of other things…

…that are more important than whatever you planned, above and beyond what they already spend.

Which you clearly didn’t begrudge when you were paying $17,600 in state taxes – after all, you’re still here, right?

But another $6K?  On top of the federal tax hikes soon to come on people like you, “the rich”?

The Dallas market’s looking pretty good, isn’t it?

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Wednesday, February 16th, 2011 at 7:38 am and is filed under Minnesota Politics, Taxes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.