I spent the entire week last week in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, talking up microbusinesses and presenting my research findings at the state capitol in St. Paul.

I am happy to report that politicians are politicians, wherever you find them.

So, for that matter are policy and data wonks. But that’s a different article.

One of the points and data points to which I was careful to draw everybody’s attention was the fact that we in these United States have 22.4 million nonemployer businesses (or at least, we did back in 2007; there are probably many more of them now).

These nonemployer businesses represent self-employed individuals running businesses without paid employees. They don’t have access to any of our social safety nets because all our social safety nets are tied to employment.

But it wasn’t until the weekend, when I was back in my own office and browsing an article in Saturday’s issue of the New York Times that I realized I had missed the most important point myself.

You see, post-recessionary job growth during the mid-twentieth century caused the number of private sector jobs to increase by about 3.5% per year. But, during expansions in the 1980s and 1990s, that figure dropped to 2.4% and, since the turn of the century, the number was down to 0.9%.

This new recession is a really deep one, resulting in unprecedented numbers of long-term unemployed putting an unprecedented strain on that system of social safety nets I was talking about last week.

“We have a work-based safety net without any work,” said Timothy M. Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the article.

Nobody knows how long it’ll be before the jobs return but it’s pretty clear that what we’re doing right now — lurching along with these costly, last-minute extensions of unemployment insurance — is unsustainable.

I have a strong feeling that after this recession there will be plenty of work to be done in the U.S. economy, but not very many jobs. The numbers may say that self-employment is declining but don’t you believe it. Just watch what the nonemployer numbers do over the next two years.

So, if we’re ever going to get with the program and start supporting self-created jobs, now is the time to do it.

Because it’s looking like, for many middle class households, the job you make will be your own.