The American economy had a strong year. How much of this can we attribute to the federal tax reform passed in 2017? Ahead of this Sunday’s second anniversary of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, The Daily Signal is featuring several interviews about the law and its impact. We begin with Joseph Semprevivo, founder and CEO of Joseph’s Lite Cookies. The Daily Signal previously told his story and he’s back to explain how tax cuts not only benefited his cookie business but also Americans as a whole. . .

So, you’re no stranger to The Daily Signal. We’ve actually covered your small business and how you supported Republicans’ tax reform package that went into effect in January of 2018. And that tax package, for people who might be a little rusty on everything that it did, a few things it did was reduce the federal corporate tax rate from 31%, 35% to 21%. It also repealed the corporate alternative minimum tax.

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So two years down the road, Joseph, looking at what your life and your business climate was like before tax reform to now two years later, how would you say tax reform has impacted your business?

Semprevivo: It’s given us more freedom more so than anything—the cash that was freed up rather than sending money to Washington, D.C., and having to budget for that money every single year. I look at it as if you have a dollar and you added that dollar, you have to put away 30 cents every year in this bucket just so you could pay your taxes 12 months later. That’s money being taken right out of the economy.

What these tax cuts allowed us to do was to put that money to work, invest back into equipment, invest back into our team members. We expanded our syrup company. We had a total of seven employees.

We expanded our syrup company. We only had one person in the syrup company. We now have 11 in the syrup company. We opened up another business, a real estate brokerage firm from the free funds that were released. We hired 16 people in that company. I just created another product line that is not related to food and that gets launched in 2020. Created another small business. We’ll have about three employees, three to five employees there.

So this has just completely given us freedom to expand, to hire more people, more middle-class taxpayers and upper-middle-class taxpayers. They’ll earn great wages and they’ll work hard and contribute to society and the economy.

del Guidice: Well, that’s incredible. Looking at what happened with tax reform, are there any specific elements to the package that you say were specifically effective? If there was one or two things you could pull out of everything that happened, is there one thing where you’re like, “This was the most helpful to us”?

Semprevivo: To me it was more of a simplification of the tax code. And I know in everything that you read out there, people are saying it’s more complicated. It’s actually simpler to do our taxes this year.

And there was a specific section, Section 199A, where in pass-through companies, which is 60 million … We figured what? 30.2 million small businesses that employ almost 60 million people in the country. They’re pastors. They get to take advantage of 199A, which means there’s 20% …

I like to look at it this way: 20 cents on the dollar of qualified income is freed up. Twenty cents on the dollar. So that business gets to employee 20 cents on the dollar toward a marketing to hire new people to give new raises. Small businesses struggle to keep people. So guess what? We’re throwing money at our team members to keep them. We can’t afford to lose them. So their wages are going up pretty aggressively, whether that’s through bonuses and raises and higher starting pay. It’s really a beautiful thing what’s been happening.

So the total of the package is wonderful. I like 199A because it freed up 20 cents on the dollar for small business owners in the United States. So that’s what I love about it. . .

del Guidice: … Speaker Nancy Pelosi and some other Democrat leaders dismiss tax relief as insignificant, with Pelosi ridiculing what Americans got as “crumbs.” And as someone who has been directly impacted by these “crumbs,” how would you respond to her assessment of tax reform?

Semprevivo: It just shows us how out of touch Nancy Pelosi is and the Democratic Party is with the hardworking, middle-class Americans. I mean, I’ve been there. I watched my parents skip meals. I’ve seen what it was like, the struggle, not to have enough money for medication and then just belittling, “Oh, it’s only $3,000 a year or $1,800 a year. People get to put in their extra back into their pocket.”

Well, that $1,800 … or $3,000 is a difference between paying your electric bill one month and not or being able to buy groceries for your children. It makes a big difference in people’s lives. Buying cars, being able to buy a home, your first home at the age of 68 years old. I mean, these are huge things.

Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Party [are] way out of touch. They cannot relate to the everyday person. They say they can, but these types of comments about, “They’re just crumbs,” just shows you that the proof is in the pudding, that they really don’t know what it’s like to struggle and be an average everyday American. And I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed of that comment.

del Guidice: Some liberal politicians, this is also very surprising given the success you’re talking about, it doesn’t seem like they appear to recognize it, but they’ve suggested that they would—if given a chance—repeal some or all of Trump’s tax cuts. How would that affect your business if that ever happened?

Semprevivo: Well, what would definitely happen is the raises would have to be removed and people would have to lose their jobs, factually speaking, because we would have to start taking the money from the economy and holding it back into the bank account.

So from a budgetary standpoint, we’re going to be losing all those funds, which are all these jobs that have been created would be reversed. And that’s just not true for my company. This is across the board.

I’m seeing expansion at businesses all across the United States, small business owners that I know and they would have to do the same thing. They’d have to lay off people. They’d have to close buildings. …

I’m hiring 50 people in my real estate company. I have 16 now. I’m hiring 50, opening up multiple locations, and I would cease expansion altogether and I’d have to look at alternative ways to save money and that’s going to be even wage cuts and downsizing. . .

del Guidice: Looking ahead, what would you like to see if Republicans decide to tackle a second tax reform package? Say “Tax Reform 2.0”? I know some Republican leaders in the House especially have been talking about that. So if they were to pursue that, what would you tell them as stuff that you would like to see included in a Tax Reform 2.0?

Semprevivo: Yes. The tax cuts 2.0 is absolutely for small businesses in general. I’d say flatten the tax brackets, make it as simple as possible to file taxes.

I like the whole thing even for a small business because remember the pass-through. So everybody’s paying on their individual tax rate. Drop the individual tax rates for all small business owners, give them the ability to have a lowest possible flat tax rate system—15%, 20%, 21%.

I’m not talking about a flat tax as in one tax for all that rate. I’m just saying flattening out the bracket and making it simple for a small business owner to file their taxes where you can almost do it on just one sheet of paper and that would just really make it fantastic for small business owners.

(Excerpt from The Daily Signal. Article by Rachel del Guidice.)