What businesses want from the next president

• The expert: Phil Town
  
• The company: Investor and Author of Rule #1 and Payback Time

"President Obama, you should man up and apologize to all the small businesses, investors and entrepreneurs in America for ignoring us for the last four years. Just tell us that you didn't realize how it all works. You thought that big government could solve economic problems and provide jobs.

"You didn't realize that every job the government creates kills two in the private sector. You thought that you had to protect the weak and the under-privileged but you didn't realize that by doing so, your regulators, your lawyers, your attitude toward us in general would damage the small-business engine that provides the jobs that makes such help possible. It would be great to hear you embrace capitalism without embarrassment, and the '1 Percent' without irony.

"Governor Romney, you get the entrepreneur, no doubt about it. But are you just a big business guy or do you also get how the country is being manipulated by major corporations that use government power to destroy their smaller competitors? Tell us how you'll purge the Department of Agriculture of Monsanto operatives and get the Fed out of small farmer's lives.

"Tell us if you'll support the small bankers against the big ones that have been labeled too big to fail. How about breaking them up so they can fail or succeed on a level playing field with the rest of us? We've lost 3,000 small banks in four years. Are you going to stop the carnage perpetrated on the little guy by Dodd-Frank?"

NEXT: 'Everyone will have to sacrifice'