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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

I’m almost shocked that the $5.5K in fees figure isn’t much higher. I’d have guessed that it’d be closer to the San Francisco >$20K figure.

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It’s $22k per the link

Yeah but they forgot to break it down. For other cities they lump in one-time-per-building costs into what is required to open a business, making the report misleading and dishonest at best. It'd be like including the cost of installing a fire door 100 years ago in the budget for every business that ever rents the building.

> In Minneapolis, for example, many brick-and-mortar business owners must pay a fee associated with the impact their business will have on the sewer system; in the case of a restaurant, this fee reaches $8,275—bringing the total cost of legal permission to start a restaurant in Minneapolis to $13,973.

I've yet to see a libertarian or libertarian-inspired article that did not heavily rely on dishonesty and this IJ report is no different.

It seems to me that if you’re reporting on “this is what it costs to open a business in this place”, that including the costs it takes to open a business in that place is fair game.

Omitting costs that might or might not outlast your business seems at least as likely to be misleading or dishonest as including them.

All they needed to do to be honest (if that was their goal, questionable) was separate out costs associated with the business from costs associated with the building. They could still argue that the costs are too high for starting a restaurant on a bare concrete pad.

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