This just in from the Department of “Duh”:  Cutting taxes on small businesses grows the market segment.

 There are now more breweries of all sizes in the United States than at any time since the 1880s. A big reason for that was the more than 20 percent excise-tax cut in September 1976.

The UK eventually did the same thing, with rapidly similar results.

Brown’s move, a dozen years old as of this spring, has led to a flowering of the British beer industry: more than 1,100 breweries, up from fewer than 500 in 2004 and fewer than 200 in the early 1970s, when British brewing—and beer—entered a precipitous decline. That decline’s reversal, according to the Guardian newspaper, “owes much to the progressive beer duty relief for small breweries that Gordon Brown introduced as chancellor in 2002.”

I’d say more than doubling the number of businesses in a given market segment in a decade counts as a successful policy shift, to say the least.