In every recession over the last three decades, it has been America’s small businesses — those Lilliputian companies with fewer than 100 employees — that stepped forward, began hiring and pulled the country out of the mire.
Not this time.
Small firms are on the sidelines, and it’s not just because of tight credit from the financial meltdown, as the Obama administration and others have been saying.
Rather, a host of factors — some well-recognized and others seemingly unnoticed in the national debate over economic policy — are converging to restrain small-business owners from hiring.
Among them:
Near-stagnant demand for goods and services as a result of consumers’ reluctance to return to their free-spending ways.
A disturbing falloff in the creation of new small businesses.
The devastation of the real estate market.
Uncertainty about the economic outlook at home and abroad.
“Small businesses are not hiring, and until then, we will not have a strong, sufficient recovery,” said Rep. Daniel Lipinski (D-Ill.), a member of the House Committee on Small Business. “I think this is why the economic recovery is moving very slowly.”
It’s a historical change of major proportions. In each of the previous three economic recoveries, small employers accounted for the vast majority of new jobs — the bulk of them coming from firms with fewer than 20 workers, according to Census Bureau data.
Small business sidelined in slow economic recovery Los Angeles Times.
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Just image if the illuminati geniuses in Washington had infused 700B directly into the Main Street economy instead of the non-productive, currently lifeless parasites, I mean financial community, to engorge themselves at taxpayer expense! Now the Obama OMG magic factory wants you and me to promote “austerity” through higher taxes and reduced services. -BJS
