TAX.COM: In an October 23, 2011, op-ed in The New York Times, Jared Bernstein neatly laid out some earthshaking facts. The former economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden summarized recent research that says small business is not the engine of job creation that politicians and the press repeatedly claim it to be. “To the extent that size matters at all for job growth, it’s really about new companies that start small,” he wrote.
Underlying Bernstein’s claims is the work of current and former Census Bureau economists who found “no systematic relationship between net [employment] growth and firm size.” (See John Haltiwanger, Ron Jarmin, and Javier Miranda, “Who Creates Jobs? Small vs. Large vs. Young,” National Bureau of Economic Research working paper 16300, Aug. 2010.) …
Why, you ask, has this game-changing research not gotten more prime-time attention? The main reason is that no politician of any persuasion wants to do anything but praise small businesses. And the media has no real interest in penetrating beyond the politicians’ consensus. It frames all debates in terms of right versus left. If conservatives and liberals agree on a policy conclusion, the media largely accept it as being factually correct…. (more)
