On September 27, President Barack Obama signed into law the Small Business Jobs Act, what the Small Business Administration calls “the most significant piece of small business legislation in over a decade.” Looking over the 101-page piece of legislation, however, it appears to me that it was written to more appease than actually help small businesses in the United States.

The excessive lending support and tax cuts of the Small Business Jobs Act scream in desperation for people to start new businesses by the end of this year. The hope is that these new businesses will provide jobs. The obviousness of this desperation is witnessed in the short-term benefits the act provides. If you want to start a new business, for instance, and reap the benefits, you need to get at least $1 of revenue from your new business by December 31; if you do, you can deduct up to $10,000 in start-up costs. If you want to invest in a small business and reap the benefits of a 100 percent tax exemption for gains you make, you must do it by this December 31.

This is not the smart way to go about attempting to refuel the economy with jobs. Three months is not enough time to make wise long-term decisions. We should not be rashly entering a business venture or putting in a five-year investment in one simply because this piece of legislation provides some benefits. Now more than ever, it is important to make thought-out monetary decisions. And these implemented benefits of the Small Business Jobs Act are encouraging just the opposite.

The new law also provides a 50 percent bonus depreciation deduction until the end of this year for businesses that invest in capital equipment. But a lot of small businesses are service businesses, which make few capital investments each year. So whom is this helping?

Another mark of the law is its increase in maximum loan size. I definitely do not think the more money a small business takes out the more they are likely to succeed, expand and create jobs. Moreover, I have yet to see major banks like Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Citibank give up their recession reservations to help out struggling small businesses. According to a California Reinvestment Coalition study published earlier this month, lending from the aforementioned top three banks fell by sixty percent from 2007 to 2009.

Usually a business needs a greater loan when it is expanding. And nowhere do I see in the act any true incentive to help small businesses expand. To expand, small businesses need better access to capital – where is this in the new law?

Overall, the dollar loss in revenue from the act’s tax cuts add up to $12 billion. To the misguided observer, this may appear to be a significant boost to Small Business America. But when you dive deeper, you realize these tax cuts are not the proper solution. Some of the biggest problems small business owners encounter are the high costs of health care and energy bills – these are the issues we need to be focusing on. Additionally, wealthy individuals will often create corporations to qualify for tax cuts in the upper income brackets. They are not real entrepreneurs, whom we want to actually be helping, but rather people that appear as a small business only on paper. For this reason, these tax cuts are not necessarily helping our economy.

I understand that we are desperate for new jobs. But at the same time, I do not think this qualifies the administration to pass mindless pieces of legislation with the high hopes of it boosting our economy back to what it once was. I am all for supporting small businesses – but in the proper ways.

Victoria Yakovleva ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in chemical engineering.