I have founded and managed multiple companies with venture capital backing and I have to say that this meme that the US is hostile to job creation or new ventures is just so much baloney. This particular type of baloney gets trotted out to attempt to scare politicians into supporting whatever concession in labor, tax or safety regulations a particular business group is hoping to get. Business lobbyists trot this stuff out in ways that make me think of 'Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers' from back in the day.
In my last company, we had significant operations in Montreal and significant operations in the US. Quebec is for all practical purposes is a hard-core socialist country. Think Sweden. So, Montreal is regulated in ways that Fox News conservatives would piss themselves over. But I found Montreal to be very easy to do business in for a couple of reasons. More after the jump.
As an investor, Montreal is easy to do business in for a couple of very pragmatic reasons:
First, even though tax rates are really high, the employees pay the bulk of it. And they seem to be generally happy with the bundle of services they receive from the provincial government. I had a really hard time getting people to accept promotions to HQ in the US even after offering substantial financial incentives (like +50%) because they could see that life is really hard in the US for the average family because there's just no support structure (daycare, healthcare, education, housing and transportation costs, etc.) Conservatives that talk about the importance of being 'family friendly' make me laugh (and, then wince).
Second, national healthcare in Quebec just removes a whole heavy layer of management responsibilities. Frankly, the best thing the US could do to encourage small business to add employees would be to remove the burden of paying for and managing the healthcare system. Way easier to focus on the mission of the business in the "socialist" Quebec than the "free market" US.
Third, Canada has exceptional (tuition-paid) public education from pre-K through what is functionally equivalent to community college. I found it easy to hire well-qualified technical people in socialist Quebec, while in the US the conservative scourge has basically destroyed public education in many areas of the country. Now they're going to work on the state universities, god help us! (Ask me about Republican Pennsylvania!)
Having been around entrepreneurs for most of my 25+ years in business, IMHO the basic rule is that people start and expand businesses where they want to live. All this hooey about taxes and regulations is generally just a way for management to extract better local and state loans and incentives, or lobby for an exemption from some regulation or another. Every business person knows this to be true, even though they would not want to admit it.
People who claim that the US is so hard to do business in generally just don't know what they're talking about. But, if we wanted to improve the attractiveness of the US as a place to start a business, the best thing we could do is raise taxes to whatever level is required to actually provide quality healthcare, education, public transit, etc to the ENTIRE population.
Oh, silly me, just thinking about how to actually get this country back on the track to growth.