Stimulus Bill to Small Business: Drop Dead

Remember America’s small businesses? They’re the ones who have served as the reliable job engines for our economy during the past several years but have been ignored in the President’s stimulus bill. In America’s modern history, small businesses have led America’s job generation machine. Fortune 500 companies haven’t actually grown jobs during the last decade and instead have garnered worse press than a Bernie Madoff telethon. Layoffs, hiring freezes and poor leadership have denied job gains to most of the blue chip companies – the same companies with their hands out to the Feds.

Over the past decade, small businesses have created well over half of net new jobs on a per capita basis. Small businesses are more innovative (based on patents) and small businesses have been leaders in technologies that have led to breakthrough discoveries. Those are facts that have been conveniently forgotten in this stimulus bill. We can correctly surmise why this is so – the uber unions who bet big on an Obama administration weren’t in the game for laughs – they went in up to their necks and are now expecting a return on their investment.

In large part, small business owners themselves are to blame for being left out of the biggest payoff to liberal interests in several decades. When you’re cutting the tall trees, you don’t bring an ax – you grab the biggest, meanest chainsaw you can find and have at it like the unions have done. You organize and raise money – you contribute large sums of that money to the candidate or party you think can best represent your interests. It speaks to the lean, mean types of operations that describe most small businesses that they just don’t have extra cash to buy influence – they’re too busy meeting payrolls and funding their own innovations.

Not one member of the senior staff currently working in the West Wing has ever held a for-profit job, signed a payroll check or owned a business. Both aborted picks for Commerce Secretary (of all the jobs!) weren’t business people, unlike their immediate successors. The recent nominee (no surprise) hasn’t a business background. These bits of troubling information make you wonder what they’ve been smoking over at the U.S. Chamber, which merrily endorsed most of candidate Obama’s development agenda. A small ray of hope amidst this business recovery amateur hour is the President’s pick to head the Small Business Administration. A successful venture capitalist, she will have her hands full working within this administration.

America’s hangover on the morning after this spending binge is shaping up to be a real beauty. Mardi Gras in the Big Easy should have so much wanton debauchery. Unfortunately, guess who gets to hose down the gutters and clean the streets after the party is over? The clean-up crew will be our kids and grandkids, deprived of their opportunity to grow small business in a political climate that only favors big unions and their big money.

Submitted by ASO member: Matthew E. Crow