Stimulus Bill: What's In It For The Entrepreneur?

Reading what is directly spelled out in the Stimulus package is great. But the more important questions is "What does it mean to Joe Average Small Business Owner?"

So Let's take a look at some of the basic numbers in the small business world. It is estimated in an average year, nearly 1,000,000 small businesses will open and $400,000 of them will close before the year is over. Additionally, another 400,000 will close within the following four years. How much wealth is lost from all of the effort that won't even remotely be addressed by this "stimulus package"?

If you add it all up, according to the article, there is $2.850 Billion in grants and loans that is being funneled to Small Businesses. That is $2,850 for each of the businesses that is going to try to get started this year (not to mention the other tens of millions already opened). It may sound like a lot when written out in the article above, but the truth of the matter it's a drop in the bucket - providing nearly nothing of any real consequence.

If you look at it simply in the context of dollars per employee - helping struggling small businesses keep their doors open - 500,000 small businesses (both start-up and existing businesses) will close their doors - and even if they only have one employee for each business, this stimulus will provide a total of $5,700 per employee. Now compare that to the $15 Billion that the auto makers were guaranteed (in loans) with only about 250,000 direct employees. That is about $60,000 per employee.

Then stop and think about the 600,000 jobs that the Administration is seeking to add to the already overstaffed bureaucratic government. Do you really think that this stimulus package is really trying to help small businesses, or do you think that the stimulus package is about keeping things "the same as they have always been"?

JJ Reich of PA 11:53AM January 29, 2009