From The Business Insider:
The small businesses that are the real drivers of employment are not participating the way they do in a normal recovery. Bill Dunkelberg, fishing buddy and the chief economist for the National Federation of Independent Business, writes me this afternoon:
“Writing about our current weak economy (Philadelphia Inquirer Currents, June 26), Mark Zandi argued that employment will improve because ‘…U.S. companies are in great financial shape’. Dr. Zandi must be referring to companies like GE which just posted profits of $17 billion (and paid no income taxes) and whose CEO is the head of President Obama’s job creation committee. This is the view in Washington and Wall Street that only thinks in terms of the “biggies” (that make large donations to re-election committees). For perspective, GE employs about 150,000 people in the U.S. Last week, over 400,000 people filed initial claims for unemployment (e.g. lost their jobs). There are 6 million firms in the U.S. that employ 1 or more workers. This includes GE, but 90% of them have fewer than 20 employees. These firms are not ‘in great financial shape’ as Dr. Zandi asserts. In a recent survey of a sample of 350,000 of them, 46% reported that profits were still falling two years into the ‘recovery’ compared to 18% reporting that earnings were improving. Firms like GE might hire more due to their good fortune, but there aren’t many of them and they don’t employ many workers anyway. It’s the small businesses that Treasury Secretary Geithner said must be taxed more to support government that provide the needed jobs, not ‘tax-free’ GE. Regulations such as the new mandatory sick leave passed by City Council are detrimental to the job creation needed by making labor more expensive to hire, a bad idea.
No comments:
Post a Comment