If you ever want to force yourself to stop wasting time online,
go to a transcript from one of the recent presidential debates.
Press Control + F, and type in "small business." If your computer
is as antiquated as mine, your browser will either freeze or
crash.
Much of the economic discussion between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney centers on small businesses. This makes political sense. It allows the candidates to discuss the economy and their plans for growth without uttering the toxic C-word: corporations.
But it's become grating to hear President Obama talking about how his tax credits have helped small companies or lecturing Romney on business development in Massachusetts. On Obama's watch, small businesses haven't just been hurting. Thanks to his policies, the entire economy has shifted in favor of corporations and the government, leaving the small-town entrepreneur shaking his head.
Salim Furth recently published a brief showing just how sticky things have become for new businesses. Employment at start-up companies, as Furth shows, is at an all-time low. In Obama's economy, hiring by start-ups fell from 15 of every thousand working-age adults to 10 of every thousand. And since most new jobs come from the rough-and-tumble world of small-business risk-takers, the effect on employment is devastating. Furth quotes economist Tim Kane who shows that stalled start-up companies cost the economy 2 million net jobs in 2010 and 2011.
And it's not just that new firms aren't hiring. Even starting a business is becoming rarer. In 2011, a measly 3.3% of unemployed Americans started a company. That's down from 4.7% in 2010 and 8.6% in 2009, according to a study by Challenger, Gray & Christmas. And it's far removed from the 9.6% of job-seekers starting businesses in 2002 that helped pull us out of the early-2000s economic dip.
Read more: http://spectator.org/archives/2012/10/26/the-small-business-canard
Much of the economic discussion between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney centers on small businesses. This makes political sense. It allows the candidates to discuss the economy and their plans for growth without uttering the toxic C-word: corporations.
But it's become grating to hear President Obama talking about how his tax credits have helped small companies or lecturing Romney on business development in Massachusetts. On Obama's watch, small businesses haven't just been hurting. Thanks to his policies, the entire economy has shifted in favor of corporations and the government, leaving the small-town entrepreneur shaking his head.
Salim Furth recently published a brief showing just how sticky things have become for new businesses. Employment at start-up companies, as Furth shows, is at an all-time low. In Obama's economy, hiring by start-ups fell from 15 of every thousand working-age adults to 10 of every thousand. And since most new jobs come from the rough-and-tumble world of small-business risk-takers, the effect on employment is devastating. Furth quotes economist Tim Kane who shows that stalled start-up companies cost the economy 2 million net jobs in 2010 and 2011.
And it's not just that new firms aren't hiring. Even starting a business is becoming rarer. In 2011, a measly 3.3% of unemployed Americans started a company. That's down from 4.7% in 2010 and 8.6% in 2009, according to a study by Challenger, Gray & Christmas. And it's far removed from the 9.6% of job-seekers starting businesses in 2002 that helped pull us out of the early-2000s economic dip.
Read more: http://spectator.org/archives/2012/10/26/the-small-business-canard
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