This from a recent article in the L.A. Times: "In every recession over the last three decades, it has been America's small businesses – those Lilliputian companies with fewer than 100 employees – that stepped forward, began hiring and pulled the country out of the mire. Not this time.

“Small firms are on the sidelines, and it's not just because of tight credit from the financial meltdown, as the Obama administration and others have been saying. Rather, a host of factors – some well-recognized and others seemingly unnoticed in the national debate over economic policy – are converging to restrain small-business owners from hiring."

The article goes on to list a dozen or so reasons small businesses are going into the tank. All of them are valid but they do not tell the whole story. I'm convinced that we made a huge mistake in bailing out "too big to let fail" corporations while neglecting the small business. The money that was squandered assisting large corporations would have been much better invested by using it to fund small local enterprise and new technology startups.

My own business is almost parked at this point and thank god I have another business that I operate with my wife which actually has the potential to get over the top. Most of my woodworking these last seven or eight months has been devoted to learning to make art turnings, something I always wanted to do. But I sure would not want to have to depend on that to make a living!

You can read the entire LA Times article at http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-smallbusiness-jobs-20100704-2,0,2662903.story

D.D.