Congress Intends to Help Small Business?

President Obama made a speech earlier this week about "helping small business". The congress has been wrangling over a small business bill that would provide $30 billion in low cost loans to community banks (at 5.0%) that in turn offer loans to small businesses. The bill would also provide about $12 billion in tax breaks. The Republicans in congress have been arguing with the Democrats over the bill, and Republicans say they are being blocked by Democrats from making any changes to the bill.

Let me get this straight. A bailout of big banks and even General Motors, to the tune of about $1 trillion was made by our government, and yet "small business" is being offered loans that amount to about 3 cents on the dollar. That's right, $30 billion is 3/100 of $1 Trillion. Wow, talk about "chump change"!

So much for political help for "small business". Here are some statistics from the U.S. Government Small Business Administration website.

How important are small businesses to the U.S. economy? Small businesses, which are businesses with less than 500 workers in the non-farm sector of the economy:

• Represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms.
• Employ just over 50 percent of all private sector employees.
• Pay 44 percent of total U.S. private payroll.
• Have generated 64 percent of net new jobs over the past 15 years.
• Create more than 50 percent of the nonfarm private gross domestic product (GDP).
• Hire 40 percent of high tech workers (such as scientists, engineers, and computer programmers).
• Are 52 percent home-based and 2 percent franchises.
• Made up 97.3 percent of all identified exporters and produced 30.2 percent of the known export value in FY 2007.
• Produce 13 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms; these patents are twice as likely as large firm patents to be among the one percent most cited.