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Arguably the main problem is national taxes and social contributions. It's extremely expensive to operate and disproportionately affects small business. Getting started isn't really the problem, staying afloat is. I suspect lowering the entry barriers will largely result in more insolvencies.
I can only speak for Germany from experience but it really feels like everything you get, you don't get. It's just working for the tax department with extra steps and terrible pay.
A small shop will turnover about 30k per month, 10k will go on taxes and non-optional non-taxes like GEMA, GEZ, IHK, BGN, etc. 3 full time staff will absorb 10k in minimum wages and social contributions. The remaining 10k have to cover 2k rent, 1k insurances, stock purchases, packaging purchases, advertising, legal and administrative services, energy costs, some liquidity savings (machines need service, sometimes replacing). There's nothing left for the owner-operator to live off and they also have rents, social security, energy and taxes to pay. It's not really viable to do a small business unless it's something with huge value addition to beat the curve.
The administrative start up cost isn't the hurdle, it's macro economics. The money is sucked out of small enterprises because the big corporations aren't taxable, they have the resources and political backing to avoid being taxed the same way.
Its better to work a bullshit job.
They should get rid of the income tax and just have a wealth tax. And also a national gains tax for companies: you make money in the country = you pay tax on that money in the country you made it. Then companies like Goolag and Macroslop can't just send the money to another country and pay taxes there.
But social contributions... nah. That has to stay. That's definitely worth it. Just because you're a small business doesn't mean your employees should work in precarious conditions.
The data is very clear. See in particular in terms of how people need to be relieved:
In that order. Note that lower social contributions can (and should) just be balanced via the federal budget.
But since people vote for parties that will never do this and all but ignore parties that would, people will continue to get screwed.
I don't read German... but maybe define "social contributions". Do you mean contributions that workers and employers pay to fund the safety net?
VAT has a function. Are you pleading for it to be lowered for everybody?
And your point 3 is already in what I said "They should get rid of the income tax and just have a wealth tax.". Are the measures you're suggesting in addition to what I said or place of it?
Very roughly: Money taken out of your salary, which goes into health insurance, pension insurance, nursing care insurance, and unemployment insurance, as well as some other minor specialized levies like U1 (to fund part of your income in sickness), U2 (to fund part of your income in motherhood), and U3 (to fund part of your income in case your employer goes insolvent). For most people, they are typically all mandatory.
About half of the first three plus U1, U2, and U3 are taken out of your "total" salary as the employer sees it (they are part of the total cost of your labor). The rest is taken out of the "gross" amount you see on your salary statement (the cost you agreed to in your work contract)*. That's why there are two differently shaded turquiose areas in the graph.
The full details are more complicated.
* Most people here in Germany don't even know about these additional levies, as they don't show up on your income statement. Same as the half subtracted before the gross ("before taxes") number you see on it; plenty of people still think "the employer pays the other half of my social contributions", which is only correct if you don't consider the total mandatory cost of your labor your salary - which imho is asinine, because that's the value your labor must exceed in order to stay employed long term.
The function of a system is what it does in the standard case, under normal operating conditions. As a flat tax on consumption, it is a regressive tax, meaning what it does is it affects poorer people more, because virtually the entirety of their income has to go into consumption. All else being equal, it strongly contributes to the current situation where most of them will never be able to save enough money to become not-poor. This is what the graph linked to earlier shows: The higher your income, the less you care about VAT. Thus, if you want to slow down the redistribution of wealth from poor to rich, reducing VAT (at the very least for staple foods, for which there is already a separate tax rate that you just have to lower to 0%) is the fastest way to do so within the bounds of tax&levy policy.
Yes. If you really don't want higher income people to profit from this at all, increase the income tax rate for the highest 5% by just enough to compensate for it, which currenly is very roughly somewhere around 130k EUR gross per year.
I'm saying: In Germany, reducing the income tax (the lower brackets, specifically) comes in (a very distant) third place among the things one should do to alleviate most people when it comes to taxation & levies. If you just reduce income tax, you don't affect poor people much at all, because most of them already pay little to no income tax.
"In place" of the reductions, and only for Germany, because that's what the linked statistics shows for it:
A different illustration for the same data is here, where vat = blue, social contributions = grey (dark+light), and income = red.
Personal note: This is imho why right-wing parties in Germany are always talking about reducing income tax. Because they know it sells well to the electorate while doing the least for most of them.
** Rougly eyeballed from the illustration, don't quote me on the numbers.
I'm not suggesting social contributions should go. But that's the cost of doing business and as such a lot of smaller enterprises simply can't afford to do business. It becomes a bigger money game. Which I think is problematic.