There is a realistic solution for creating jobs and turning around our country and it lies with small businesses. Let’s talk “simple math”, as President Obama noted in his remarks just a few days ago, but my version of simple math has a both a view of the numbers and an outcome that’s a bit different.
According to the US Small Business Administration, citing the most recent Office of Advocacy and Census data, there are:
–27.5 million small businesses in the US
-Of these, about 6 million have employees and 21.4 million are “Solopreneurs” (businesses that have no employees); and
–18,311 business with over 500 employees
The historical unemployment rate is about 4-5%, but just to illustrate how important small businesses are to turning around this economy, consider the following extremely “simple math”. With 14 million people unemployed currently, this means that:
— If one out of every two small businesses (50%) hired just ONE person, we would have zero unemployment;
–If each of the 6 million small businesses that has employees hired just two people, we would only have 2 million people unemployed in the US (1.3% unemployment);
–In contrast, business with more than 500 employees would need to hire an average of 655 people each to get to hire the same 12 million employees (i.e., to achieve 2 million people unemployed)
What’s a more reasonable strategy? Helping the small businesses of this nation to grow modestly by hiring one to two people or trying to get big business to take on massive acceleration in their hiring?
Read the rest of the post with proposed solutions at The Huffington Post.
