Thursday, April 15, 2010

How important are small businesses?

Today my husband attended an all day continuing education program to keep up his architectural license--got 4 credits and lunch. He saw a lot of guys he knew when he was a partner in a small firm (Feinknopf, Macioce, Schappa). They were all out of work. A "small business" is one with fewer than 500 employees. Architectural firms usually run about 15-20 if they are "big." The big firms are scrambling and eating up the smaller jobs they used to ignore just to keep their staff. Most small businesses are unincorporated, so business income is treated as personal income. This means Obama's plan to tax the high income earners (the top 1% pay 71% of the taxes) hit small businesses the hardest. So while 47% of Americans are paying nothing or getting big tax credits once a year on government payday, they are are helping to kill small businesses which are what usually lead the way out of recession.

How important are small businesses to the U.S. economy?

Small firms:
• Represent 99.7% of all employer firms.
• Employ just over half of all private sector employees.
• Pay 44% of total U.S. private payroll.
• Have generated 64% of net new jobs over the past 15 years.
• Create more than half of the nonfarm private gross domestic
product (GDP).
• Hire 40% of high tech workers (such as scientists, engineers, and computer programmers).
• Are 52% home-based and 2% franchises.
• Made up 97.3% of all identified exporters and produced 30.2% of the known export value in FY 2007.
• Produce 13 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms; these patents are twice as likely as large firm patents to be among the one percent most cited.

Source: U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census and International Trade Admin.; Advocacy-funded research by Kathryn Kobe, 2007 (www.sba.gov/advo/research/rs299tot.pdf) and CHI Research, 2003 (www.sba.gov/advo/research/rs225tot.pdf); U.S. Dept. of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Did you ever ask yourself in 2008 just what Obama wanted to transform this country into?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Obviously into more government workers.

Anonymous said...

Isn't the obvious answer to incorporate the business?

Norma said...

To anon: If all you knew about incorporation was this blog, you might think so, however, there are huge disadvantages to incorporating--legal fees, double taxation, huge increase in paper work, etc. You can google the details.

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