One of the items overlooked by the MSM regarding the dismal economic “recovery” of the last five years is the complete decimation of the self-employed.
There are currently 10 million people classified as self-employed in US. That’s 5% of the total workforce. Incidentally this is also a record low.
It is not coincidental the massive increase in reliance on Government handouts (46 million on food stamps, 47% of US households on some kind of Government assistance) has coincided with a significant drop in self-employment and independence.
It is also not coincidental that many entrepreneurs and self-employed individuals have decided to close up shop. A weak economy generally means weaker sales. Combine this with massive increases in healthcare costs, taxes and the like, and it’s a lot harder to be self-employed today than it was 10 or 20 years ago.
All the talk of “helping small business” and “creating jobs” is just that: talk. Those who actually show initiative to create business shouldn’t be overburdened with tax loads and bureaucratic red tap.
If the political class really wanted to create jobs, they should focus on growing the number of self-employed. If we were to increase the percentage of self-employed Americans in the workforce to just 10% where it was in ‘90s, we’d need to add 4 million self-employed people to the workforce.
Obviously some of these entrepreneurs would fail, but a significant percentage of them would find some degree of success, creating who knows how many jobs.
But let’s go back even further. If we returned to the same level of self-employment as that which existed during the 1960s (18%) we’d create 15 million self-employed and who knows how many jobs.
With the total number of Americans in the workforce around 146 million, this would mean increasing the workforce by over 10%. That would be a truly incredible increase in job growth… even greater than that which the US economy created going back to 2003!
We missed a great opportunity to change the US for the better in 2008. What could have been a wake up call for fiscal discipline instead became the biggest crony capitalist boondoggle of all time as politically connected institutions were bailed out using tax-payer money.
The repercussions of this are still being felt with the system now even more leveraged (meaning more debt) than it was in 2008). This in turn has paved the way for the REAL crisis, which is coming… and this time around, it will be entire countries that go bust, not just a handful of banks.
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