If he were sitting in the House chamber during President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address, Churchill would have been flabbergasted by the contention that a “wealth gap” was the cause of the nation’s woes.

It’s not a wealth gap that is slowing recovery – it’s a crisis of confidence in Obama’s ability to lead the nation.

Some of history’s most accomplished leaders, like Churchill, got their inspiration from time honored thought leaders and statesmen. In his State of the Union Address, Obama got his inspiration from the Occupy movement, and catered to this largely discredited group.

This agenda is fraught with peril.

It is clear that rather than face the lingering unemployment numbers, Obama has decided to embrace a Pro-Poverty vs. Pro-Growth philosophy.

Looking to win reelection by instigating class war is immoral and inexcusable.

It threatens to break the very social fabric of this country. And some groups are starting to buy into this toxicity.

Politico recently revealed that the number of times the media mentioned the phrase “income inequality” increased nearly five-fold during the first two months of the Occupy protests.

In a late 2011 poll by the congressional daily newspaper The Hill, data showed that almost 75 percent of Americans believe that inequality is a problem for the United States.

In his State of the Union Address, the president suggested that: “We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by. Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.”

This is his reference to the “Buffett Rule,” a proclamation by Warren Buffett that his tax rate is less than his secretary. And if to drive the message home, Buffett’s secretary Debbie Bosanek, was sitting near Michelle Obama.

This issue is misleading because Obama continues to equate the capital gains tax rate with the ordinary income tax rate. These are two different taxes.

For Buffett or any other person, before having capital to invest you have to first earn it, which leads to higher personal income rates. But these funds are being redeployed and invested into all sorts of enterprises, small and large, new and old, at a lower tax rate to encourage, inspire and create a class of risk takers. Without risk takers, there can be no job creation.

Now Obama is suggesting that a tax rate of 30 percent be imposed on the wealthy. But if you listen closely, the definition of wealthy keeps changing.

Remember when the wealthy were once Americans with annual incomes of $250,000? Now they are described as “millionaires and billionaires.” If this is supposed to mollify most Americans, it will be an utter failure.

The late comedian George Carlin once remarked: “Conservatives say if you don’t give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they’ve lost all incentive because we’ve given them too much money.”

Does he honestly think that Congress will be amenable to altering the current tax code during an election year? Understanding we have a serious problem with our tax code, it is going to take far more than a couple of tweaks to fix it. This is pure political rhetoric.

It is also a self-fulfilling prophecy. Obama cannot mention jobs without raising taxes, growing the size of government and increasing regulations. These are not compatible to job creation; something he would have instinctively known if had ever had to create jobs, or even included job creators in his inner circle.

In his State of the Union Address, the president boasted that: “If you’re an American manufacturer, you should get a bigger tax cut. If you’re a high-tech manufacturer, we should double the tax deduction you get for making products here.”

It sounds like a practical idea, but most economists contend that tax breaks to encourage specific investment decisions are a bad idea, and are rarely effective. Tax breaks given in the past actually diminished investment by the technology sector. Instead, it is generally agreed that the key to investments and job creation is reducing corporate taxes.

It is obvious that a desperate Obama will try throwing everything and anything against the wall to see what sticks. Promising more handouts? Sure.

Castigating the wealthy as the scourge of the earth? Sure. Creating class war? Sure. Creating jobs? Not so fast!

The Obama State of the Union Address was nothing more than a stump speech that he will be making across the country. And he got the networks to help him get his reelection bid out to America. But this time people are listening and they don’t like what they hear.

According to Kantar Media, which studied the tuning behavior of 100,000 households across the United States in the moments leading up to, during, and after President Obama’s State of the Union address, during the first five minutes of the address, 27 percent of the audience tuned away.

The bottom line for Obama: no jobs, no votes.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

If you listen closely, he will side-step the priorities he failed to accomplish in his three years in office, and won’t accomplish in 2012. They all have one thing in common: They are needed like blood to resuscitate a hemorrhaging economy where flat lining job creation is beyond the hope of recovery anytime soon.

Here are the five issues he must address to create jobs but will fail to act on.

1. Using tax reform as a competitive advantage

When a company spends its energy wading through and complying with an onerous and confusing tax code, it creates uncertainty. Uncertainty kills jobs. To suggest as Obama often does, that American businesses believe they are not paying enough taxes, is absurd.

Our tax code forces our manufacturers to move operations overseas where it favors foreign producers, even as it discriminates against American producers hiring American workers. It is time that the U.S. tax code stop infringing on American business prosperity, and instead institute a tax code that gives us a competitive advantage to bring our factories home and to grow jobs in the United States.

During the Reagan years, from 1981 to 1989, tax reform helped make this period the most prosperous in American history, creating some 17 million new jobs.

President Ronald Reagan understood that by simplifying the tax code and reducing corporate taxes, it incentivizes our job creators.

There are some promising ideas circulating such as the Flat Tax and the Fair Tax. But these are being ignored by an administration that isn’t willing to fix our current broken tax code other than piling on new taxes. We need tax reform that works with us, not against us.

2. Passing healthcare reform that establishes an efficiently run healthcare system

We all agree that the current healthcare system is a convoluted mess. It is too costly and too fragmented to be effective. It rattles the mind to realize the cost of healthcare is increasing each year at six times the cost of inflation. If left unchecked this alone is enough to turn an economic superpower into one resembling a third-world country.

The Supreme Court by mid-year will rule that imposing personal mandates to purchase insurance is unconstitutional, thereby tossing Obamacare into the trash bin.

The question is what comes next?

It will take a new administration not encumbered by the embarrassment and folly of Obamacare to keep America competitive by finally presenting healthcare reform that focuses on affordability, accessibility and predictability.

3. Immigration reform that builds our economy by attracting the world’s best talent

Obama promised immigration reform, but when highly skilled immigrants who have received degrees at our universities are punished instead of being recruited to boost U.S. technology and innovation, America loses. Foreign students come to the U.S. to take advantage of our exceptional higher education system. We need to retain that knowledge here through a visa program that allows them to contribute in a significant way to our economy.

Truth be told, some of the world’s best minds and most talented entrepreneurs are lining up each morning at our embassies hoping to come to America to invest their talent, education and resources. Sadly they are being turned away in record numbers. Just seven percent of our permanent visas are given to people whose skills could reinvigorate our global leadership. Unfortunately we are losing the recruitment battle to countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

We must stop denigrating illegal immigration and focus on legal immigration.

4. Regulation reform that reduces the burden on our job creators

Though Obama has given lip service to the excessive regulation being thrown at our job creators at the federal, state and local levels, he has done little about it. The best he could do was find $10 billion in cuts out of the $1.7 trillion each year our businesses spend in compliance costs. That’s more than they pay in taxes!

Instead of spending $800 billion on a failed stimulus, for which every dollar we had to borrow, we should reduce the cost of regulation. We would not need to borrow a penny and it would be a boon to job creation.

5. Education reform that puts equal emphasize on vocation.

The Obama administration is populated with Ivy League alums. Besides having no connection to our job creators, they have no connection to other types of education. Specifically, they fail to recognize the relationship between education and vocation. That’s why they have ignored data that projects that over half the jobs generated over the next decade will not require a college education but technical training. Technical jobs pay well and are in high demand.

To balance our educational needs, it will take a new leader with vision that understands job creation at its most basic level. We have one of the smartest and hardest working workforces in the world. We need to ensure they are equipped to compete. We have not done well in tapping into the inherent skills of our workforce to fill today’s technical jobs and those of tomorrow. .

As the election draws nearer, the Obama administration’s glaring missteps in job creation and righting the economy will become increasingly clearer to the American people. In 2012 there will be no legions of believers lined up several blocks to vote. They have tired of the rhetoric without action and have found that Obama’s vision and leadership were no sturdier than the backdrop of faux Roman pillars at Mile High Stadium where he accepted the Democratic nomination.

What’s worse, in order to get re-elected he cannot run on his record. No more lofty ideals and pretending to be the “President of all Americans.”

Even his supporters are disenchanted, recognizing that his ideals were merely campaign fodder. In order to win he will need to go on the offensive and run the most negative, cringe-worthy campaign in American history.

This will redefine gutter politics.

He once ran as an immortal, now he is just running scared.

Ironically, that’s how much time American taxpayers spent this year fumbling through stacks of confusing IRS forms. Americans spend about $300 billion a year in tax-preparation costs traversing a mind-bursting 3.4 million word tax code.

The net effect of this archaic tax system is not only its compliance cost, but it ultimately punishes companies for being successful and discourages them from hiring. Taxing our corporations and businesses is a giant hoax. Taxes and tax related costs paid by our companies are simply passed on to the consumer.

Those being impacted most from corporate taxes are the poor who have less to spend. The best way to protect the poor (and the middle class) is to ensure they have good paying jobs and keep more of their hard-earned money. It is estimated if corporate taxes were eliminated consumer prices would be reduced by 25 percent. This would vastly improve the quality of life for all Americans.

Fortunately, some fresh thinking has the potential for turning the onerous U.S. tax code into an engine for job creation and to put millions of our people to work. These ideas can be implemented quickly and thus be a positive force in difficult times.

The two leading options for tax reform are the flat tax and the consumption tax. Both would raise $2.4 trillion, the current level of tax revenue being collected, while vastly improving America’s productivity and competitiveness.

The flat tax would be filed on a postcard-sized form. The only deductions contemplated would be for charitable contributions, child care and healthcare costs and mortgage interest, which politically are very popular with most tax payers.

According to the Heritage Foundation, adopting a 17 percent flat tax “would lead to significant improvements in U.S. economic performance after the first 10 years of its implementation. Specifically, this new tax system would lead to 3.8 million more jobs by the end of the tenth year; add $545 billion to gross domestic product in the tenth year alone; increase the level of personal savings by 50 percent; raise non-residential investment by 9 percent; and expand the nation’s capital stock from $17.8 trillion in 2014 to $19.1 trillion.”

The flat tax eliminates the tax bias against savings and investment, thereby ensuring better economic performance in a competitive global economy.

The consumption tax is best characterized by the FairTax, a nonpartisan piece of legislation that abolishes all federal personal and corporate income taxes, as well as payroll taxes, estate taxes and capital gains taxes. In their place would be one simple 23 percent national sales tax based on what a consumer spends, not on what they earn.

Tax collection would be the responsibility of each state and imposed on all new purchases of products and services. It enables retirees to keep their entire pensions, refunds in advance the sales tax on purchases of basic necessities up to the poverty level, removes the tax advantage of foreign produced products sold in America, and brings transparency and accountability to tax policy.

Best news of all, it abolishes the IRS.

Under the FairTax the rich naturally pay more.

What the two tax reform programs have in common is they take the uncertainty out of business planning allowing business owners to reduce their high marginal tax rates so they are encouraged to take more risk and create more jobs.

Both tax plans would safeguard Social Security and Medicare.

According to Harvard economist Dale Jorgenson, tax reform would boost national wealth by nearly $5 trillion, by increasing the value of all income-producing assets. Imagine how this wealth would filter through the economy in increased share values and investment capital.

We must incentivize our entrepreneurs to get into the game. There is a faulty perception that business owners keep all the money they make to feather their own nests. This is a myth perpetuated by people who have never started or run a small business.

The current tax system rewards cronyism and penalizes entrepreneurs and small business. Enacting a new tax code would be a boon to these over-taxed, hard-pressed job creators.

If the objective is to stimulate private-sector led economic growth, increase tax receipts, simplify compliance, close loopholes, and promote fairness then it starts with adopting a totally new approach to the U.S. tax code. Options are on the table that every tax payer – especially job seekers — should embrace.

Although encouraged by President Obama’s pledge during the State of the Union Address to double exports and open up new markets, we are not seeing any progress toward meeting these critical objectives. I wish he was being sidetracked by job creation –but that is not the case either.  Once again the Obama administration has failed to understand that the key to stabilizing the economy and job creation rests with supporting the nation’s entrepreneurs, especially small business exporters.  As a public service, let me humbly suggest that there are five initiatives that must be considered in 2010 to move this country forward.

1) Pass the three pending Free Trade Agreements

Did you know that for every dollar invested in exports by small and mid-size companies  through export finance specialists, the results is $500 in export sales?  The Department of Commerce puts the figure at $415 in export sales for every dollar invested.  So think what opportunities are being missed by not passing three major free trade agreements:

Colombia
In Colombia, U.S. exporters have paid $1.3 billion in tariffs that could have been eliminated if the U.S. – Colombian Free Trade Agreement had been voted on by Congress.  Ambassador Schwab noted that since more than 90 percent of Colombian products coming into the U.S. are duty free, U.S. exporters should enjoy a reciprocal agreement with Colombia. Ironically, Colombia supports the agreement and is willing to eliminate most tariffs.

South Korea
U.S. citrus exporters have paid $250 million in tariffs that could have been eliminated had Congress voted on the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS-FTA).

Panama
The commercial potential of this agreement for the United States is significant. US companies already export nearly $3 billion annually in merchandise to Panama – and at $2.3 billion, the US merchandise trade surplus with Panama is our fifth largest in the world.

2) Defeat the Cap and Trade Bill

Everybody agrees that the world needs to reduce pollution.  The trouble is that the world cannot agree on how to do it.  A perfect example is the ill-conceived (and slowly dying) Carbon Cap and Trade legislation, which has the government setting a “cap” on the total amount of carbon that can be emitted nationally; companies then buy or sell permits to emit CO2. The cap can be reduced over time to reduce total carbon emissions.

It sounds plausible, but as the cap is tightened and companies are stripped of initial opportunities to “offset” their emissions, the price of the carbon emission permits will skyrocket beyond the current estimate of $28 per ton of carbon. The end result is that the corporate costs of buying these expensive permits will be passed to consumers.  Worse, small businesses will not be able to afford their energy expenses, delaying job creation.  This legislation must not move forward if we want to create jobs in 2010.

3) Incentivize Small Business With Tax Breaks
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The current solution to every problem is for the U.S. government to tax our corporations until they flee our shores and tax the rich until they are rich no more. This has left the U.S. as the most over-taxed nation on earth.  Just consider the following:

Nearly half of our states when combining federal and state income taxes already lead the world in the highest corporate tax rates of any industrialized country.  If Iowa, Pennsylvania and Minnesota were countries they would be the top three highest taxed in the world. Massachusetts, Alaska and New Jersey would be four, five and six.

Twenty-four U.S. states have a combined corporate tax rate higher than top ranked Japan. Thirty-two U.S. states have a combined corporate tax rate higher than third ranked Germany. Forty-Six U.S. states have a combined corporate tax rate higher than fourth ranked Canada. All fifty U.S. states have a combined corporate tax rate higher than fifth-ranked France.

Higher taxes are obviously not the answer, because they will only propel jobs and wealth away from America. It does not matter if our taxes were quadrupled; there is not enough money in America to bring redemption to any of these seemingly incurable problems.  We must stop over-taxing small business, the leading source of job creation.

4) Leave NAFTA Alone

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is by far the most beneficial piece of trade legislation Congress has ever passed. At a time of economic upheaval where job creation must be at the heart of our recovery, it is mind-boggling that Congress could contemplate changing or even opting out of the agreement. As supporters of fair market access for American exporters, it is our obligation to push Congress to maintain NAFTA with its current provisions. Since NAFTA was implemented, the U.S. added 30 million new jobs.

Consider that during 2008, the U.S. exported $200 billion to Canada (up 11 percent over 2007) and $115 billion to Mexico (up 13 percent). In fact, 30 percent of all U.S. trade goes to NAFTA partners.

Further, most Americans do not appreciate that today, Canada is America’s biggest trade partner, and it is where the U.S. gets most of its crude oil. It does NOT come from the Middle East.

Consider that Mexico imports more U.S. products than China and Japan combined, and that Mexico is neck-and-neck with Saudi Arabia when it comes to energy exports to the U.S.

NAFTA creates American jobs, so it must not be renegotiated or altered.

5) Restore Faith in Free Enterprise

It’s time to restore America’s belief that this country’s best times are still ahead and that there is a role for everyone.  No nation on Earth can out-think and out-work the American worker.  What is missing is a sense that there is a chorus of like-minded Americans who are looking for answers and the empowerment to make their voices heard.

Entrepreneurs must be given the resources and incentives they require to profitably create new enterprises.   That means tax breaks, opening up new foreign markets, providing greater access to working capital, and supporting programs that restore America’s competitive advantage throughout the world.

This erosion in spirit has been building, and ca not pinned on a single administration, but the time to reverse the trend is NOW.  Americans have a “Conscientious Equity” in the future of this country and along with it, an inherent responsibility to play an active role in shaping how this country sustains free enterprise and economic growth.

Part of this responsibility is making our government representatives accountable for their performance.  Staying loyal to a political party to curry favor with party leaders while ignoring the consequences of ill-advised programs and bills impacting constituents perverts the reason they were elected as our representatives.  The welfare of the nation should be the overriding priority, and those who fail to recognize their responsibility do so at their own political peril.   Our conscientious equity demands that we pay attention to the issues that affect this nation. Feigning ignorance shirks your responsibility as a citizen, and ignoring it constitutes a failure of moral character.

Let’s make 2010 the “Year of Engagement” – when Americans unite to support small business and restore the economy and American jobs.

You know what other jobs will be disappearing? State jobs, because states need to shed workers to deal with huge budget deficits. Already in March, state and local governments shed 9,000 jobs.

Come on folks, the government doesn’t create jobs. We all know that private-sector temporary jobs won’t become permanent unless employers see steady economic growth. And that’s not something we’ve seen with the ineffective stimulus plan.

We all know the solution. We talk about it all the time on the show. It’s very easy to understand. It’s the Neal Asbury Five Step solution:

1. Small business creates 75 percent of all jobs. So Congress needs to increase aid to small business.
2. The Treasury should redeploy bank bailout money for small business loans.
3. Take the crushing tax burden off of small business so they can hire.
4. Open up new foreign markets by passing new free trade agreements and ratifying the three trade agreements languishing in Congress.
5. Give America hope that the American Dream is alive and well and that our best days are ahead of us.

Let’s say your favorite football team announces that they have fired the entire coaching staff. In their place, they have hired a staff where only one new coach has ever played football. The rest just followed the team by watching games from the safety of their couch. Would you be looking for a Super Bowl appearance this year? But suppose the country elected a president whose primary job was to jumpstart the economy by creating jobs –especially in the small business sector where 75% of new jobs are created. Wouldn’t you expect him to surround himself with a staff with deep business experience that have actually run companies and understood the dynamics of P&L? Then folks, welcome to the Obama Bowl.

A recent study took a look at past administrations to identify those US presidents who recognized the importance of surrounding himself with a cabinet with hands-on business experience. The results are revealing. Which five administrations had the highest percentage of cabinet members with business expertise. Here they are in order:

• Dwight Eisenhower – 57%
• Ronald Reagan – 56%
• GW Bush – 55%
• Richard Nixon – 53%
• GH Bush – 51%

Notice anything striking about this list? Just study their political affiliation and the answer will come to you quickly. So which five presidents had the lowest percentage of cabinet members with business experience?

• Bill Clinton – 39%
• Teddy Roosevelt – 38%
• Jimmy Carter – 32%
• JFK – 30%
• Barack Obama – 8%

Notice the pattern of political affiliations with this group?

The question that the study asks, and rightfully so is:

“How can the president of a major nation an/or society…the one with the most successful economic system in world history… stand and talk about business when he’s never worked for one?”

If you go back to our football analogy, when the team doesn’t win, the coaches usually get fired. Shouldn’t the team’s owners (the American people) have the right to fire their coach? Well, the timing couldn’t be more perfect. The November mid-term election, which coincides with the start of the NFL season, would be the perfect time to put our “coach” on notice and send a strong signal that his time is limited. Let’s get our team playing from a position of strength and turn this season around before its lost—and with it, millions of potential jobs. Get in the game and vote!!

-Neal Asbury

As an example, the percentage rate for US men and women who survived cancer for more than five years is 65 percent. It’s only 46 percent in England, and 42 percent in Canada.

If you have diabetes in England and Canada you are out of luck. While 93 percent of US patients diagnosed with diabetes get treatment within six months, in Canada it’s 43 percent, and in England, an abysmal 15 percent.

Need a hip replacement? You better not be living in England where only 15 percent of patients get a hip replacement within six months. In Canada it’s 43 percent. In the US, it’s 90 percent!!
If you want to see a medical specialist in the US, 77 percent of patients can see one within one month. In Canada, only 43 percent will see a specialist within one month. In England, only 40 percent will get specialized medical attention. If you think finding a good restaurant in England is hard, try finding an MRI scanner. There are only 14 for every million consumers. In Canada, it’s 18 per one million. In the good old US, it’s 71 per one million.

Finally, despite news that purports that US seniors with limited incomes aren’t getting quality healthcare, 12 percent of Americans over the age of 65 say they are in “excellent health.” In England, only two percent.

But before we start celebrating the condition of our US healthcare delivery system, remember this is based on the system we have TODAY. Once universal healthcare mandates takes effect in the US, we’ll be living the nightmares of patients in England and Canada. But there is some good news: you’ll have lots of extra time on your hands to look for specialists, surgeons and MRI scanners.

Related:

Large companies will get hit with 9% increase in health costs under ObamaCare

The paper further reports “A broader measure of unemployment, including those who have quit job hunting as well as those working part time because they cannot find full-time work, remained about the same at 17.3 percent in December from 17.2 percent in November.” In addition there are those that have taken jobs well beneath their education and skill level just to have some sort of income while awaiting better times. It is simply beyond comprehension that the U.S. would have shadow unemployment figures that rivals that of developing nations.

How can the Administration make their job claims? Some call it ObaMath. In a recent column, Newsweek’s George Will described the phony math behind the job creation claims. “Having used stimulus money to give raises to its 317 employees, Head Start in Augusta, Ga. reported 317 jobs created. A Georgia nonprofit multiplied the percentage of raises (1.84) it gave to employees receiving them (508) and reported the stimulus had saved 935 jobs.” That’s ObaMath.
If you follow ObaMath to its ultimate conclusion and believe that the Administration has saved 640,000 jobs through the billions it has already spent on the stimulus package, U.S. taxpayers paid $260,000.00 per job, paying a salary of $59,000 per job.

In fact, ObaMath is so suspect, that the White House no longer uses the word “stimulus”– Obama has not used the word since October, 2009. The lingo being communicated by White House staffers is: “targeted actions”, designed to try and distance its job claims from the jobs creation program.

Now, according to press reports, the White House has abandoned its controversial method of counting jobs under President Obama’s economic “stimulus”, making it impossible to track the number of jobs saved or created with the $787 billion in recovery money. The report notes: “Despite mounting a vigorous defense of its earlier count of more than 640,000 jobs credited to the stimulus, even after numerous errors were identified, the Obama Administration now is making it easier to give the stimulus credit for hiring. It is no longer about counting a job as saved or created; now it’s a matter of counting jobs funded by the stimulus. That means that any stimulus money used to cover payroll will be included in the jobs credited to the program, including pay raises and pay for people who never were in jeopardy of losing their positions.”

So how can the Administration make good on their claims of generating new jobs? The answer is readily apparent: give small business the resources they need to succeed. Since small businesses create more than seventy percent of all new jobs, it is hard to understand why the stimulus package provides almost nothing for small businesses and entrepreneurs – the part of the economy that has historically lead the nation out of our economic downturns.

The recovery starts by taking off the yoke of high taxes that discourages small business owners from hiring. The fewer resources they have, the less they have to spend on new jobs.

Conduct a reality check on the new healthcare plan. Do you actually know what’s in the plan? Well, nobody else does either, and that includes small business owners. Without knowing what kind of new burden they face on healthcare costs, they cannot determine if they can retain current employees, let alone consider adding new jobs.

The bottom line is that uncertainty is bad for business. Someone has to take a stance on job creation. If it is not the government, then it’s all of us. Visit Truth for America and learn how you can contact your local, state and federal representatives. Demand to know why they are not doing more for job creation. “Ghost Busters” was a funny movie but there’s nothing funny about looking for invisible jobs that don’t exist.

The CEO of a Newark, Del., search marketing firm, Ozick began looking for new clients in Ireland, England, Scotland and Australia. Though he recognized the challenges of working abroad, which include everything from complying with international tax laws to the vagaries of currency exchanges, Ozick needed the new business.

There have already been some bumps. While the 16-nation euro-zone, which includes Ireland, began pulling itself out of the recession in the third quarter, the U.K.’s economy shrunk 0.4%. Still, there has been enough new business for Ozick’s firm, Wired Rhino, that the CEO feels he’s achieved his goal. “We wanted to diversify our revenue streams and be less dependent on one country’s economy,” he says.

With the U.S. economy sputtering forward in fits and starts, some small-business owners are looking abroad for growth opportunities. Entrepreneurs like Ozick are not only working with longtime exporting hubs, but also with countries with growing economies likes India and China. What’ s more, they are getting a helping hand from agencies like the Export-Import Bank of the United States, which since the downturn has increased trade assistance.

Under the bank’s enhanced programs, U.S. small businesses with annual export credit sales of $7.5 million or less are now eligible for coverage under a program that protects small-business owners in the event of buyer default. Generally, this insurance covers 95% of an invoice, at a cost of roughly 55 cents per $100 of shipment for 60-day repayment terms. (The previous ceiling for this benefit was $5 million.)

The bank also recently opened its working capital guarantee program to indirect U.S. exporters. These are U.S. companies that produce goods or services that are sold to other U.S. companies, and are subsequently exported. Previously the program was open only to companies that export U.S. goods directly. Under the working capital guarantee program, Ex-Im Bank guarantees 90% of a bank loan, including principal and interest. “As the economy changes and world trade changes, we’re always adjusting the products to make exporting more conducive to the U.S. marketplace,” says Ex-Im Bank Chairman and President Fred P. Hochberg.

One stumbling block for business owners has been awareness. Even though programs are available to help raise funds, “the American government has been slow to publicize supports,” says Neal Asbury, the founder of the Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.-based food-service equipment supplier Greenfield World Trade. “Even China’s equivalent to U.S. agencies that oversee exports does a better job at promoting greater trade,” he says.

He should know. Asbury has been shipping commercial refrigerators, ice makers and dishwashers to countries within Asia since the late 1980s. However, it still took him more than a decade to learn that the 75-year-old Ex-Im Bank and its working capital program existed. In fact, of the 6,911 U.S. commercial banks insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, only about 47 banks have an active relationship with Ex-Im Bank, says Hochberg. Further, just 10 insurers participate in Ex-Im Bank’s specialized programs, he says. To raise the Bank’s profile, “I’m going coast to coast and hit eight cities and try to reach as many outlets as we can; we’re revamping the web site and we’re trying to sign up more banks,” Hochberg says.

In the meantime, owners have to negotiate credit terms with reluctant foreign manufacturers. It can be very challenging, says Asbury. “Here you are promising your customers that they’ll receive their orders saying ‘don’t worry’ and there you are promising the factory that you’ll pay, again, saying ‘don’t worry.’”

Asbury’s company now exports to more than 100 countries including Japan, Mexico, China and India. “If I knew then what I know now, my life would have been much more pleasant,” Asbury says. “I would have achieved greater success earlier on.”