Mia Love Takes a Stand

Date: November 14, 2014

Congressional candidate Mia Love of Utah makes a ‘moral case’ for business ownership.

In 2012, Mia Love came within 768 votes—out of about 250,000 cast—of winning her race for U.S. Congress in Utah’s 4th Congressional District. This time around, the Republican former mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah, believes that small business voters pushed her over the top.

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As mayor of one of Utah’s fastest growing cities, Love worked with business owners to successfully navigate the town’s drastic transition from agricultural fields to a booming residential community and to structure growth so that taxes didn’t become onerous even through a decade of 1,700-percent population growth. Her strategy included cutting business fees and curtailing needless regulations.

“I’m telling small business owners that the approach I’m going to take in Congress is that I don’t believe we can change public policy by dealing in boardrooms and back rooms in Washington,” says the 38-year-old Love, who also is a wife and mother of three. “We need to take our case to the American people. And if we can get in front of them and start talking with them about free markets and how they have lifted people out of poverty, and make the moral case for business, we can change things.”

Making Her Case

The “moral case” for business ownership is important to Love in part because her own father at times took on two and even three jobs, including cleaning toilets, to help her family get by and pay for school when she was growing up in Connecticut. “It was the people who owned businesses who allowed my father to make ends meet in this way without having to be dependent on government,” Love says.

Love believes that many lawmakers in Washington, D.C., take little heed of the needs of business owners, moral or otherwise. They’re choking business with overregulation. In Utah, for example, the federal government has an iron grip on about 64 percent of the state’s land area and makes it difficult for entrepreneurs to access it in a responsible way. 

Such actions are at the core of business owners’ concerns about “overregulation, overtaxation—and Obamacare, which encompasses both of them,” she says. “We need to replace Obamacare and put something else in place of it.”

Leading the Charge

After the election, Love plans to fight for a reduction in U.S. corporate tax rates, notwithstanding Democrats’ recent concerns about so-called tax inversion mergers in which companies have been motivated by much lower corporate-tax rates abroad to acquire companies in other countries so they can change the domicile of the combined entity. Opponents want to see such moves stopped. “The answer is to lower tax rates,” Love says. “The government always thinks it’s just another tax hike away from prosperity.”

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