I guess I don’t even need to tell you this but I don’t see any of that when I look at these numbers.

What I see instead are a lot of federal and state lawmakers — you know, the ones who constantly prate on and on about how small businesses are the engine of our economy — who are failing miserably and don’t appear to know it.

Half of the nation’s sole proprietorships earned less than $10,000 in receipts in 2005. That is a statistic that should make everybody at the Small Business Administration and every other small business support agency hang their heads in deep shame.

At approximately the same time that the Census Bureau was releasing the 2007 nonemployer data, another important bit of research into nonemployer businesses was also released — this time, by The Enterprise Center at Salem State College. The study, entitled “Proprietor Employment Trends in Massachusetts and Essex County: 2001- 2006,” was commissioned by The Enterprise [...]

A little over a month ago, the House Small Business Committee held a hearing to discuss Congressional efforts at health care reform, in search of bipartisan consensus on broad principles for said reform. Last week, the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship took its turn to host a roundtable to discuss small businesses and [...]

After a single year of tepid growth in 2006, the population of U.S. firms without paid employees other than the business owner(s) came roaring back in 2007 with almost a million new firms, according to data released by the Census Bureau last week. Overall, nonemployer firms increased in number by almost 940,000, or 4.5% in [...]

What’s going to have to happen before our nation’s leaders make the connection between jobs and microbusinesses?

Well, more than one connection, really.

There’s the easy stuff, the screamingly obvious connection between microbusiness employers and the millions of jobs they create. But there’s also the nonemployers — and that’s a subject that requires enough real thought to be daunting for the average public servant.

Possibly you will remember the plan hatched in Congress calling for merchant account banks to collect and verify the taxpayer identification numbers (TINs) of the vendors whose transactions they processed and report those amounts to the IRS. In addition, if they could not verify a TIN, they would be required to withhold 28% of that [...]

The hurtling juggernaut that was the nonemployer business population explosion came close to a screeching halt in 2006, according to data released last week by the U.S. Census Bureau. The number of nonemployer businesses — defined as U.S. firms with no paid employees outside the business owner(s) — crept up by just under 2% in [...]