10 FOR 10

Small businesses were the backbone of America. They were the jobs creators. Those days are long gone. The mega-corporations and mega-banks have captured our economic system, sent good paying manufacturing jobs overseas, financialized our economy, and bribed politicians to pass regulations designed to crush small business owners. Then Obama put another nail in their coffin with Obamacare. The final nail would be a $15 minimum wage. The results of this survey prove we are in a recession and prove the BLS bullshit birth death jobs adjustment to be a fraud. The BLS should be subtracting jobs every month for the loss of small businesses.

“It is no surprise that optimism is muted and owners’ expectations about the future are less than exuberant. Small business owners are not encouraged to expand their businesses when consumer spending is down, US trading partners are weakening and the government continues to try and micromanage the private sector with red tape and regulations.

The Federal Reserve and other central banks are hoarding risk free assets while the demand for these assets is rising. This keeps long term interest rates artificially low and creates longer term financial problems (like how to fund future pension liabilities) while denying savers a decent return on their savings. Thinking that their policies significantly impact the real economy,in spite of evidence to the contrary, the Fed persists in holding rates down and is probably not inclined to raise rates until GDP and employment growth rates pick up substantially. The fact that the Fed doesn’t raise rates signals that they don’t expect the economy to improve.

Meanwhile, the government continues to extend its control over the private sector, taking actions to restrict the growth in the energy sector, promulgating policies to support union growth in the small business sector, supporting climate change policies that will crush economic growth, unleashing the EPA to regulate every aspect of business activity and ignoring the issues that are important to small business growth such as tax reform and the regulatory avalanche that diverts the use of capital and owner time to unproductive activities.

So it is no surprise that optimism is muted and that owners’ expectations about the future are less than exuberant. Government policies increasingly impinge on the private sector, diverting resources to unproductive uses like 9,000 IRS employees to exact ACA penalties on taxpayers. When new business owners were asked to characterize difficulties encountered and whether or not they were more difficult or less difficult than expected, 60 percent said that government regulations and red tape were much worse than expected, far more than any other factor. That survey was taken in 1990 – it has only worsened.”

NFIB Chief Economist William Dunkelberg