The folks over at the Kauffman Foundation have been doing a certain amount of dignified jumping up and down, yelling about reasonably new research about where jobs in the U.S. actually come from.

That’s a little bit misleading, of course.

Where do jobs come from? differs significantly from the more traditional question of where do babies come from not just in detail but in the fact that there are several potential answers for the former and only one answer for the latter.

But that’s a different column.

What the folks at Kauffman want policy makers (and everybody else) to understand is that job growth comes from young, growing firms and that, if we want job growth, then we need to have more of said young, growing firms.

They have jumped up and down and yelled to such good effect that New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was writing about it last weekend.

Unfortunately, some of Tom’s conclusions (or Kauffman’s) were a little flawed. He writes:

But you cannot say this often enough: Good-paying jobs don’t come from bailouts. They come from start-ups. And where do start-ups come from? They come from smart, creative, inspired risk-takers. How do we get more of those? There are only two ways: grow more by improving our schools or import more by recruiting talented immigrants.

Yeah, we have to rely on people who are now elementary students or on people we import from overseas because, naturally, those of us who were born here and have already grown to adulthood are entirely lacking in smarts, creativity, inspiration or the stomach to take a risk.

Well, gee willies, Tom. What about the rest of us? Or don’t we count?

For the record, there have probably been at least two million new businesses formed over the last two years, possibly more. The biggest current challenge to job growth we face is neither education nor immigration; it is the simple fact that the federal government has no idea what to do for us.

There are all sorts of ways we are disadvantaged when we decide to step out of the “safety” of the labor force to start our own businesses. Which means there are all sorts of ways the government could support us risk-takers, if they were so inclined.

Once they’ve played with loans and federal contracts, there’s nothing left in the policy makers’ small business playbook. And, for some peculiar reason, they all seem allergic to simply asking us what we need.

I’ll admit, this is all very disappointing.

When I was a kid, I always imagined that being invisible would be a lot more fun than this.