House GOP Bill Would Cut Small Business Taxes

ALAN FRAM

WASHINGTON (AP) — If the bill makes no exceptions, that means the reduction would apply to 99.9 percent of the nation's 27.3 million firms, according to Census Bureau data for 2008, the most recent year available. Companies of that size employ about half the country's 121 million paid workers, the Census data shows.

While there is no formal definition of a small business, most industries use 500 employees as the cutoff, as does the Small Business Administration when it conducts research, according to a Treasury Department paper issued last summer.

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