As we end 2011, here are two good pieces of news for small business.
First, I actually have something good to say about the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB). I haven’t been very charitable to the organization over the years because they always seem to side with the U.S. Chamber on issues. The NFIB’s complaints about health care reform and regulations keeping small businesses from hiring and their objection to increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans and using the money to decrease the deficit or invest in creating jobs—all are such big-business positions.
But finally this week an NFIB executive dropped the big business mantra about the different challenges facing small business and agreed with what real small business organizations have been saying is the number one problem holding back our hiring. “The key to everything is cash coming in the front door,” said William Dunkelberg, the chief economist for the NFIB.
Consensus has arrived in the small business community…lack of consumer demand is our biggest problem standing in the way of creating jobs and economic growth.
The other piece of good news for small business is more data affirming that small businesses are the real job creators, not the millionaire and billionaire’s reporting some small business income or multinational corporations. Many in Congress are fighting to protect these groups from higher taxes because, the say, it would hurt the “job creators”.
The payroll company Automatic Data Processing, which keeps track of these things, reports that in November businesses with up to 49 workers created 110,000 jobs nationwide. That compares to just 84,000 new jobs from businesses with 50 to 499 workers and only 12,000 new jobs from employers with 500 or more workers.
So Happy New Year to all the real job creators—our small businesses!