A little information for the tax-cutting true believers out there. It has been reported that the tax increases proposed by Obama and the sunsetting of the tax cuts from the Bush years will affect 80% of small business.

In fact, as Media Matters for America has repeatedly documented, the Tax Policy Center has estimated that a mere 2 percent of tax returns reporting small business income in 2007 earned enough income to be affected by the expiration of the Bush tax cuts on individuals earning more than $200,000 per year and families earning more than $250,000 per year -- not 80 percent.

Of those income tax filers in 2007 who reported small business income -- and there were over 24 million of them -- only 481,000 of them reported net income in the highest two tax brackets. It isn't the guy who owns the small restaurant, or the woman with the knitting store, or the electrician who works out of the back of his truck, who nets that kind of money (at least not as a rule). It takes a lot to get to over $200 in income. Having been there until 2008, I know how much work is involved. With my income in 2005, I received a notice from my former employer that I was eligible for their special Deferred Comp program, which was only available for the top 2% of earners for the whole company. That meant that I was in rare territory. So I can only assume that the same holds true for a lot of people in this country. Plenty of business owners will make $250,000 in gross income, but what they report as net income -- what will be taxed -- is usually somewhere far less than that.