Critics are charging the fiscal year 2000 Clinton spending program is aggressively hostile toward entrepreneurs and small businesses.

Here are some of the provisions they object to:

• Spending increases for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration -- which critics contend heaps mounds of paperwork, regulations and fines on small businesses -- amount to 9.2 percent, despite an inflation rate of just 2.1 percent a year.

• The enforcement budget of the Internal Revenue Service would increase 8 percent, while funding for the Environmental Protection Agency would climb 10.2 percent.

• Outlays for the National Labor Relations Board would rise by 13.7 percent, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission would get a windfall budget increase of 20.1 percent.

According to Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation, Clinton's targeted tax cuts are more than offset by tax increases of $89.7 billion over the next 10 years. Critics contend these increases would harm businesses.

Levies would be placed on subchapter S corporations, tobacco products, punitive damages resulting from court proceedings, signing bonuses for employees, and federal government filing fines -- along with the reimposition of Superfund corporate income and excise taxes. Then add in minimum wage increases, massive health-care regulatory schemes and expansion of the reach of the Family and Medical Leave Act to smaller enterprises.

The result, defenders of small businesses charge, amounts to massive abuse of small firms.

Source: Raymond J. Keating (Small Business Survival Committee), "Impeach Clinton's Anti-Entrepreneur Budget," Investor's Business Daily, March 24, 1999.