That's the word from economists who spoke with Herald-Sun business writer Monica Chen for her three-part series, "Where are the jobs?" last week.
According to policy experts, most of the potential for growth lies with small and medium-sized businesses such as the one started by Chris Allen, a former GlaxoSmithKline IT director who has launched a solar installation business in Research Triangle Park.
The experts and anecdotes are backed by data from the Small Business Administration, which reported last week that businesses with fewer than 500 employees account for more than half of the jobs in the private sector.
To former corporate recruiter Steve Pruner, who saw his client portfolio shrink by 90 percent, 500 employees might seem unwieldy. Pruner spends most lunch hours manning a hot-dog cart at the corner of Pickett Road and Tower Boulevard, a do-it-himself solution that keeps the wolf from the door. As he noted, "Nobody ever went broke selling hot dogs."
As cheering as these one-man, one-dream stories are, there's a bad-news rider and, as usual, the bad news comes straight from Wall Street: The mom-and-pop business can't get any of the seed money that they need to stanch the gush of vanishing jobs and generate new ones.
"If you have an idea, but you can't get credit to do the idea, you can't hire people," said Rob Teer, whose family businesses -- real estate and construction -- have been two of the hardest hit by the recession.
That's why we back the Obama administration's plan to shift $30 billion in Troubled Asset Relief Program funds away from their original purpose -- bolstering banks to free assets for lending, a plan that has failed to trickle down to Main Street -- and into a Small Business Lending Fund.
The proposed fund, developed in cooperation with the Small Business Administration, would guarantee loans and temporarily eliminate fees for qualifying small business expansions. It would also cut taxes for businesses that create jobs and raise salaries.
There are a lot of reasons our legislative delegation ought to support the plan, but we can't say it better than Chris Allen, whose former employer announced another round of layoffs last week: "When you have your own small business, you can do it 10 to 15 years," he said. "With a big corporation, you're there one day and, boom, you're gone the next."
