Reply #7: The time honored republican sacred cow

[quaker bill]

It is an icon, a cultural archetype, the little mom and pop business, as American as apple pie. They make an absolute idol of it.

What are they really? It is true that most bear little likeness to the notion of mom and pop running the "general store" down at the corner anymore. The many of them would be tiny special purpose corporations, often LLCs, set up to wall off risky business ventures from the main business. Each little construction project tends to have one. This structure makes getting liability insurance easier because the scope of the entire business is limited to a single project. A handful of people are "hired" at the beginning, and "laid off" at the end, just before the business disolves. They are then "hired" by the next small business created for the next project. This process adds to the number of jobs "created" by small business, but it is the same handful of guys doing the same thing for the same money, just in a different location, and all this managed by the same large corporation.


These guys also go all warm and fuzzy over the "job creation" numbers, but what they never discuss is the "job loss" numbers. Since "small business" represents a roughly stable portion of the workforce, if not slightly declining, then something must be true, "job losses" = "job creation" at least roughly. If "job creation" was significantly and consistently greater than "job loss", then over time, more and more of us would be working for small business.

If the myth about small business being the fountain of new jobs was anywhere near as true as republicans have stated over the last 30 years, nearly all of us would be working for small business by now. We aren't and this is because small business is also the largest source of bankruptcy and layoffs. This however is never a topic of conversation, thus the sacred cow analogy. Sacred cows can never do wrong.