By JACK FARIS

When it comes to obfuscation and confusion, leave it to our nation’s capital to lead the way. Albeit with good intentions, the District of Columbia recently undertook an effort that was supposedly designed to make quick evacuations calm and steady. But when the sign painters had finished, the result was more confusing than instructive.

Now evacuating a city in the face of imminent disaster isn’t something to take lightly, especially in light of recent terrorist activities. But those in charge of Washington’s civil defense undershot the mark by a mile.

Apparently not trusting the unmistakable “Evacuation Route” signs, similar to those you see in hurricane areas, to do the trick, they installed non-alerting green and white “event route” notices pointing the way to neighboring states. It seems they didn’t wish to scare the tourists.

One hopes the need to test this new system never arrives, but it points to the mind-set that exists in this federal city. The Federal Unemployment Tax Act (FUTA) is a good example. Small-business owners, seeking to find their way through the morass of tax law twists and turns, more often than not wind up in a blind alley. After all, they’re entrepreneurs, not tax experts, and only an expert can navigate those less-than-clear regulations.

It’s important to remember that these entrepreneurs aren’t folks just out tooling around the countryside on a joy ride. They’re the millions of Main Street business-builders who start out with an idea, crank it up with some ingenuity, fuel it with inspiration and roar off in search of the American Dream. Along the way, they create jobs, generate wealth for our nation, invent things, improve our way of life and give back a huge portion of the revenue in the form of taxes.

But unemployment taxes deal small firms a double blow because levies are collected at both state and federal levels. The federal tax pays for the program’s administrative costs, while the state tax pays for the actual unemployment benefits that laid-off workers receive.

But that’s not all. In addition to this double taxation, more than two-fifths, or 43 percent of the tax money lifted from small business cash registers through the FUTA program in 1998 was spent on unrelated federal government programs.

The Bush administration has mapped a plan to route some of those tax dollars back to Main Street: the proposal would cut the federal unemployment tax by 75 percent through January 2007. It would also make the federal forms simpler. While they’re at it, Congress could work with the states to coordinate state and federal filings in one form, making the filing process easier to follow and giving entrepreneurs more time to spend kicking their operations into high gear.

As the economy revs up, the small-business engine that drives America is raring to go. The reform plan could pave the way to lower taxes, simplified tax regulations and more integrity in the system itself.

Congress has an opportunity to point this recovery in the right direction.

JACK FARIS is president of the National Federation of Independent Business, the nation’s largest small-business advocacy group.