First, inspired business performance; then, Obama fires up Dems for Bennet

Tom Mauro's big splash for Colorado Performance Excellence is next week. He hands out 2010 Timberline Awards to Elevations Credit Union in Boulder and the VA Health Administration Center, Denver, for continous performance improvement in 2010.

Also four Foothills-level awards for beginners in the CPEx program to AlloSource in Centennial, Avista Adventist Hospital in Louisville, the Poudre Fire Authority in Fort Collins, and the S.M. Stoller Legacy Management Program in Broomfield.

The awards mark the work done by participants in the statewide CPEx program which uses Baldrige National Quality Award criteria to improve business performance of an organization.

The all-day program at the Marriott South at Park Meadows, just west of Interstate 25 and Lincoln Avenue in South metro Denver, costs $275 per person for attendees from profit-making firms, and $250 per person for nonprofits. The speeches and seminar tracks explain how Baldrige criteria measure business excellence  and improvement.

Mauro's organziation has been spending the year trying to develop ways for more Colorado small businesses to become a part of the Baldrige Quality Award competition. He will announce the results of that effort during this ninth annual CPEx Quest for Excellence event.

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President Barack Obama fired up Sen. Michael Bennet's troops in a telephone town hall Thursday night, telling Bennet volunteers: "There couldn't be a better cause right now because obviously this is a tough election.

"We've got a lot of headwinds ... the economy is still tough in Colorado and around the country.... We inherited, both Michael and me, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

But working together, you know we have been able to stop the size of job losses, stabilize the economy, get small bsuiness its financing, get our economy growing again.

"And Michael has been a critical part of that work in the Senate each and every day.!"

I was invited to listen because I contributed a small amount to Bennet's campaign. It was fascinating hearing the president of the United States speak over the phone. And Obama spoke with the same cadence and pronunciation that are mimicked so well on Saturday Night Live each week. You had to laugh.

Of course, you could push a button on your phone to volunteer your own boots on the ground during these last few days of Bennet's close race. I pushed the button, but am still waiting a call from the campaign to get my own feet out there walking for him.

Its hard to run a government or a campaign like a Baldrige-quality business.

But I think at least this government keeps trying.

Stop the pain at 8.5 percent unemployed

I read in the news today that charitable giving was down nationwide by 11 percent in 2009 compared with 2008, and that the lingering end of the Great Recession might have had something to do with the decline.

The recession officially ended during the early part of last year, and yet most news stories that mentioned it also point out a stubbornly high, 9.5 percent national unemployment rate and anecdotal evidence from most everyone that they don't feel like they've recovered from the economic shock of the past three years.

Maybe we should redefine a recession, which currently is described by sustained negative economic growth over a period of time. Any sustained positive growth, no matter how small, officially ends the recession.

Maybe we should automatically consider the United States in recession as long as the national unemployment rate is at or above 8.5 percent. That way public pressure could be maintained on both business and government leaders to create jobs that increase consumer spending.

Consumer spending has been regarded as the only true savior of American workers and owners during all of the recessions and near recessions during my life.

When consumers spend their money, workers and owners, managers and employees, even government officials prosper. Fewer children remain in poverty. Fewer food stamps are distributed to feed the hungry.

Some might say 8.5 percent is a bit high. But during my lifetime, full-employment for the nation was once described at a 5 percent unemployment rate, until, during boom years and after welfare mothers were forced to go to work, even lower unemployment rates were accomplished in many states of the union.

Lots of people are working and tons of money is being made when the national unemployment rate dips below 5 percent. But real pain starts to be felt among middle- and lower-income people at around a 6 percent rate.

Yet pain has never been a signal to the rich in this country that middle- and lower-income people deserve some economic relief. When someone else is feeling economic pain, our American-Calvinistic work ethic kicks in, and we blame joblessness on a lack of character among the poor and uneducated.

So 8.5 percent, though high, seems an appropriate level to consider the workforce automatically worthy of a little bit of aid from the nation's pool of wealth.

It doesn't seem unreasonable at that point to increase taxes on the top 1 percent of earners in the country, as well as on those who earn money purely from their invested assets. We could hold those taxes in place at least until enough jobs are created to allow the middle class and working-class poor to regain the economic footing necessary to boost consumer spending again.

Middle-class spending will, as usual, give the economic engine of the country enough momentum to warrant pulling back again on any extraordinanry taxing of the rich.

That's a 63-three-year-old non-economist's perspective of the world on this Monday morning.

Let me know what you think.

Middle-class consultant, worthy of a tax break

Eric Marburger is one of my croquet buddies, a part-time human resources expert working with the Mountain States Employers Council, and an entrepreneur HR consultant with private clients.

Marburger started his business, ESM Consulting Services, twelve years ago to supplement his and his wife Helen's income after the couple arrived in Colorado in 1998.

It was a good gig. Helen's position came with medical-insurance benefits, so Eric's tiny business and the Mountain States part-time work gave him the schedule flexibility he wanted in his work life. Together the couple made a good middle-class living.

"I don't want to work 60 hours a week," Marburger told me. Or "try to make as much money as possible."

Then came the Great Recession. Helen lost her job in February, but the couple continued their health-insurance through COBRA, the safety net that allows you to keep coverage provided by your employer's health plan as long as you can pay the full premium for the insurance.

As a human-resources expert for hire, Eric has had to know the ins and outs of health-insurance coverage, employee compensation, employee retention and terminations, other benefits and the whole range of HR chores within a company. His specific expertise is compensation, and you can tell he knows the subject well when he discusses problems employers regularly encounter in a down economy:

"There's only so much money organizations have for their employees," he said. "I tend to work with firms and organizations where personnel services might be 80- to 85 percent of the total expenditures for the company. Well, if health insurance is going up, let's say 12 percent, which is probably what it's averaged over the last few years, there's not a lot of money left over for pay increases or for any other additional benefits that might be wanted by the employees or even by the management of the company."

In other words, Eric Marburger knows the crossroads of operating a business profitably where rising health-insurance costs, declining sales, employee demands amid reduced numbers of workers (layoffs), and government regulation pull a business owner in multiple directions. As a sole-proprietor of his own consulting service, Marburger also makes a good example of a businessman dealing with all the push-and-pull that 21st century business entails nowadays. And this is a man who doesn't want to work 60 hours a week.

But Eric has been busy lately. We don't see him on the croquet court as often as we once did. His part-time work as a business consultant for Mountain States (about 20 hours a week or more) and the revenue he generates from his small consulting business (about $30,000 a year) is far more important to his family income now than it was before the recession. And like any good entrepreneur he is broadening the spectrum of services he can offer a client.

"I've tried to diversify my areas of expertise a little bit," he said, "just kind of make myself a little more valuable generally."

Making himself more valuable to the family, as well. For example, with Helen's layoff after 12 years at her employer, Marburger knew his family could qualify for a reduced health-insurance premium through a subsidy created by the economic stimulus package passed by Congress in 2009.

"We're paying $460 a month for probably a $1,400 insurance plan," he said, but the subsidy runs out next spring, as does his wife's COBRA coverage, so the couple is going to have to figure out a way to pick up new health insurance on their own, perhaps with a new insurer.

That's why learning the changes businesses face with the onset of national health-care reform becomes a large part of Eric's effort to make himself more valuable. He can help himself, his clients and his family all at the same time. And maybe even make more money.

Nevertheless, Marburger never expects to be one of those small-business owners with family incomes above $250,000 who might be taxed more heavily if Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy are allowed to expire in December. Republicans and some Democrats (I betcha they're the wealthy ones!) want to renew the tax cuts for the rich, but the Obama administration wants to limit the renewals to the middle classs.

President Obama's opponents on the issue argue that small-business owners who pay taxes on their profits through their personal income-tax filing will bear the brunt of the increased taxes on the wealthy, and, therefore, limit their ability to hire new workers at their small businesses.

To be quite frank, and since I'm a blogger and can use more colorful language than I could in a newspaper or a magazine, that argument is pure bullshit.

Small-business owners who include business profits on their personal-income tax forms are more often sole-proprietors like Eric Marburger, and they fall far short of the $250,000 income level that would be subject to restored higher taxes.

Marburger is a compensation expert. He agrees with me that the small-business owner who makes enough money to be be placed in the $250,000-or-higher tax bracket is a rare bird, indeed.

"I've certainly worked with folks that earn $250,000, but they're not small-business owners," Marburger told me. "They're executives of larger organizations. I've worked with a lot of health-care companies, hospitals and corporations, ... [and] the executives are the ones earning over $250,000 a year. I don't know that I've worked with any small-business owners that would fall into that category."

He also said his own income from private clients for the past few years amounts to about 30 percent of his annual take-home pay, which falls far below the $250,000 level. "Not even close," Eric said and laughs. "Not even close."

While I was a full-time business reporter and writer, I avoided doing profiles of business consultants because I considered them less than substantive parts of Colorado's economy. Self-employed contractors who don't employ others usually have little influence on the economy and, therefore, are often ignored by business journalists.

Now that I'm a self-employed journalist and wannabe consultant, I have a different perspective.

It's still true that small businesses with employees are the job-creators national, state and local governments are trying to stimulate nowadays to hurry up the nation's economic recovery.

But it is also true that the self-employed contractor -- a carpenter, electrician, even a business consultant -- is among those who suffer the effects of a business downturn, much like the unemployed who get laid off from small companies and larger ones as well.

The self-employed also add to the recovery when they get work as an economy improves. As Obama says over and over, we're all in this together. The rich people who made money during most of the Bush era leading up to the nation's latest economic downturn may have to give back a little of it to put a bunch of middle-class business consultants, construction workers and professionals back on the job.

Furthermore, if you've been making $250,000 a year through the downturn, it seems like a small price to pay for the privilege.

Pledge to the same ole

Did it look to you -- like it did to me -- in  the pictures of John Boehner giving his "Pledge to America" that the goof ball may be losing a little of his oft-mentioned tan?

I looked for a picture of Boehner to illustrate this contention, but found only that I am not the only one who writes about his tan. There's a whole page of references on Google to "John Boehner tan," so you can look it up yourself if you don't believe me.

To me, though, it looks like Boehner's work on the empty pledge took a little color out of him.

According to the New York Times version of Boehner's presentation yesterday, the pledge is about as empty-headed as the Republicans' two years of opposition to anything Democratic that has been introduced in Congress, or anything at all Obama, for that matter.

So, this from the Times' David M. Herszenhorn: "The approach Boehner set out is based on a belief that smaller government, lower taxes and less regulation will fuel economic growth, create jobs and ultimately lead to a more prosperous nation. It deviated little from the tenets of mainstream conservatism over the last generation."

Now, for a minute here, I'm going to sound like a Democratic politician facing a tough mid-term election battle or a lot like other Democrats including former President Bill Clinton who are taking up this cudgel in response to Tea Party invective: Were not the "tenets of mainstream conservatism over the last generation" what got us into this whole mess in the first place?

Free-market capitalism and less regulation led to greedy real-estate mortgage brokers and exceedingly rich Wall Street bankers.

Lower taxes led to a let-the-rich-get-richer recovery from the Internet recession of 2000-2001 that, if you recall, remained remarkably "jobless," resulting in more jobs lost during the first four years of George W. Bush's reign than his second-term administration was ever able to regain.

In effect, the 2001-2008 recovery showed only that a president could allow an economic downturn to have its way with the American middle class while he also waged two wars and turned a national budget surplus into a withering record deficit. And don't let it be forgotten that it was George W. Bush and the Republican majority in Congress who grew the government to the size that now Republicans want to butcher.

Herszenhorn also quotes conservative analysts as saying the $100 billion Boehner promises to cut from federal spending would hardly make a dent in the current $1.3 trillion deficit. 

So a much paler-than-normal Boehner made a pretty pale pledge to America. He was promising more of the same ole, same ole Reagan/Bush conservatism that history has shown does no favors for America's middle incomes.

The sooner Americans -- and perhaps even Ohioans -- reject John Boehner's empty promises, the sooner  the good-ole-boy congressman can get back on the golf course to burnish up that trademark tan.

Baby Boom bust II

When you write as one of the many bloggers few people read, you are encouraged when a national writer addresses the same topic you've already taken up, confirming your instincts about what's happening in the world around you.

Take Michael Kinsley, for instance, writing in The Atlantic magazine about the bust of the Baby Boom.

Look down this page, and you'll see that in my last piece, written over Labor Day weekend, I took a slightly different and much shorter tact than Kinsley.

We both generally conclude that until now Baby Boomers, that great generation of Americans born between 1946 and 1964, have blown it.

Kinsley suggests in his article that our generation has 19 years to save its reputation, by allowing ourselves to be taxed to the point that we pay back all the money we and our parents borrowed to finance the society we have enjoyed over the past half century in America.

My suggestion was there was no way to make repairs.

But Kinsley has a point, and people who read me know I am all for making amends for our sins while we can.

Check out Michael Kinsley's piece. It's politically impossible, but at least he offers a solution.

Baby Boom a bust

I come here on Labor Day Weekend 2010 to declare the Baby Boom generation a failure.

I'm part of the failure. In fact, all my life I liked to tell people I was born at the cusp of the wave of the boomers. Born in 1947, the official second year of the boom, I have turned 63 and am still trying to make a success of myself.

Reading the business section of the Denver Post today, pushed me to the conclusion that I am not alone. All my fellow baby boomers have, as Peter Fonda said in "Easy Rider," blown it.

Here's a little inventory of the stories and comment you'll find in the Post that back me up.

"Unions facing tough times," by Steve Raabe tells the story of a decades-long decline in union membership in Colorado and nationally, which coincides with the devastation of the nation's middle class in America.

Most of us baby boomers came from the loins of the blue-collar generation that organized America after World War II, although even that great generation never reached more than a 34 percent share of the workforce as union members.

That means, too, we baby boomers were young witnesses to the worst of union abuses: Jimmy Hoffa, wages paid for work not done, false claims of on-the-job-injuries, and a cycle of wage increases that made the work not worth the price.

So most of us chose the white-collar way, and found ourselves going to work, and teaching our children to go to work, in what is now parodied on TV as "The Office." The idiots are real; the trouble is they are us.

All the while the old wealthy and the new wealthy, the very establishment we rebelled against as hippies, made sure that,along with unions, the entire middle class in America was drained of power and influence, reduced to a status just above poverty line.

But let me continue my inventory.

Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, offers a piece in favor of a second round of stimulus measures for the economy, arguing that the unemployed and underemployed in America will never get back to work without one.

It's hard for me to even mention the idiocy of the article paired with Weisbrot's, by William F. Shughart II, a senior fellow at The Independent Institute in Oakland,Calif., who argues against a second stimulus package because: "The only sure way to perk up the job market is to cut taxes permanently and rein in public spending and excessive regulation."

Which, by the way, is also the establishment's sure formula to push what's left of the lower middle class below that poverty line, and to ensure future opportunities for the wealthy to become more and more -- even exceedingly -- rich.

But then there is the column by Robert J. Samuelson that provides the real indictment of an entire generation.

Samuelson gets to the failure of baby boomers to provide their children and their children's children a proper education, which was the real route baby boomers took to whatever prosperity they have gained.

Samuelson catalogs the failure of parents and education reformers in America to improve learning for large swaths of U.S. students over the years. "Motivation is weak because more students (of all races and economic classes, let it be added) don't like school, don't work hard and don't do well."

That's where we blew it. Unfortunately, there's no way to go back and make repairs.

Small-business finance in small chunks

Small business in Colorado has someone coming to its rescue: Christopher A. Smith, right, the CEO and founder of new commercial lender CSI Holdings LLC, which is ready to fill a crying demand for small-business-sized loans.

The credit crunch that started in 2008 has lasted for almost two years now, despite a stimulus bill that was partly aimed to goose small-business lending and hiring, and despite later unsuccessful Obama administration attempts to use bank-bailout money to revive small-business operators.

"I saw it first hand," says Smith, who for two years before opening his own firm was executive vice president of Hillcrest Bank's expansion into Colorado. "I couldn't lend," Smith said of those first years when banks refused to let go of bailout money.

On Wednesday, Smith announced the opening of CSI Financial's Denver corporate office at 999 18th St., Suite 2700, Denver, 80202, and at http://www.csifinancial.net/. He said his experience in Colorado, where the firm will kickoff its lending, showed him "there was immense demand out there" for loans that were small enough for small firms to handle.

"That's why we specifically picked the niche," Smith said, reiterating what the company said in a press release: "CSI will differentiate itself by servicing small and lower-middle market companies with financing needs ranging from $50,000 to $1 million."

I know from covering Denver and Colorado's small business community for about 20 years that there are no lenders who market themselves as providers of that sized loan.

But Mr. Smith is coming to the rescue, and he doesn't even have to go through Washington to do it. Maybe you should check him out!

CSI also offers factoring services which is an alternative method of financing your business.