quote:

INTERVIEWER: While President Obama travels the country pushing his jobs bill, Republicans insist the White House wants to raise taxes on what they call job creators, to pay for the bill. These days, House Speaker John Boehner often remarks: Job creators are on strike.

Representative JOHN BOEHNER: I can tell you the American people - the private-sector job creators - they're rattled by what they've seen out of this town over the last few years.

INTERVIEWER: So with all the talk of job creators, who, exactly, are they? To help us answer that question, we're joined by Justin Wolfers. He's a professor of business and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. Welcome to the program.

Dr. JUSTIN WOLFERS: Melissa, a pleasure to be here.

INTERVIEWER: And Justin, how would you define job creators in the current economy?

WOLFERS: What's funny about that Boehner quote is, I think we used to call them - employers. So obviously, there's some political rhetoric here. But, you know, it depends where we are in the business cycle. Right now, there's a lot of hiring going on, for instance, in health, professional business services. And actually, manufacturing has been one of the bright spots as well.

INTERVIEWER: Which is interesting because for so many months, manufacturing jobs were declining. And now there's a little bit of an upturn, right?

WOLFERS: Well, not only so many months, so many years - and in fact, so many decades. So the fact that there's actually increases in hiring going on, increases in the number of jobs in manufacturing going on, is actually historically unusual.

INTERVIEWER: We hear a lot about small businesses being the engine of job growth in that - country. How true is that?

WOLFERS: Categorically false.

INTERVIEWER: Really?

WOLFERS: Yeah. In the United States right now, the latest numbers suggest there are about 6 million firms with paid employment. Ninety percent of those are small businesses, which means they have, you know, 20 or fewer employees. Those 90 percent of all firms only make up 20 percent of all jobs. So while there's lot of businesses, there's not a lot of jobs in small business.

INTERVIEWER: Does that depend, though, on how, exactly, you define small business? Because a lot of the numbers coming from the government refer to businesses of 500 workers or fewer, and they say two-thirds of all new jobs are created by those small businesses.

WOLFERS: So it sounds like - I'm actually not aware of the statistic you're referring to. The general sense of what I was just telling you, that small businesses are most businesses but very few jobs, is true no matter what the definition is. I think there is no ordinary sense of the word small business that includes firms with 500 employees. It just doesn't make sense. I regard that as a huge firm - and it would be an enormous factory, for instance...

INTERVIEWER: Interesting, too, that a lot of small businesses are so small that it's essentially one person. It's maybe an independent corporation, or someone who's self-employed could be a small business?

WOLFERS: Yeah. And so this is actually one of the parts where the rhetoric of small business, I think, really leads us astray. If you actually look at the data, what we mean by small businesses, what they actually are, they're things like real estate agents or my hairdresser. They're lawyers; they're doctors. You talk to these folks, do they have any interest in innovating or bringing new products to market or any of the things we think of as being the engine of economic growth? The answer is no. My dry cleaner likes to take my clothes and then give them to me four days later. Most small businesses don't even have ambitions of being the engines of economic growth, or the engines of jobs.

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ORIGINAL: willbeurdaddy

The statistics, even if it categorized "small business" properly, does not address the issue of small business job creation. DUCY?

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ORIGINAL: NeedToUseYou

Ummm, successful small businesses eventually aren't small businesses anymore.

So, take google, which was a small business at one point, Well that small business eventually resulted 10's of thousands of jobs, however, apparently they want to ignore the numbers after it hits 500 employee cap, or 20 or whatever.

Microsoft was a small business, Apple was a small business, Cisco was a small business. The company that owned the factory I worked in started in a guys basement, of course it grew, then was bought buy a larger corp.

Obviously if you don't count the numbers after 20 employees it will look as if the cumulative total of small business job creation is less than a mature corp.

I really don't know how people don't get that, megacorps generally take decades to grow, and a large fraction of the time they started as sub 20 employees, and almost everytime as sub 500 employees.

Anyway, that whole interview is retarded, it ignores the seed, and is trying to focus on the tree.

Look the tree is bigger, seeds suck they are small, what good is that... LOL. sarcasm