Friday Good News: The Biden Small Business Boom
From a January 17 statement from the Biden Administration:
Small businesses are the engines of our economy and the hearts of our communities. We learned today that my first two years in office have been the two greatest years for new small business applications on record, with more than 10 million total new businesses created. It’s the latest confirmation that my economic plan is working to build our economy from the bottom up and middle out.
With unemployment at a record low and the two strongest years of job creation in our history, there are reasons for economic optimism all across our country.
Rebuilding our infrastructure and supply chains here at home will help our small businesses strive for decades ahead. My law to help crack down on big corporations who are cheating on their taxes will also help level the playing field for our small businesses, which is part of why it has been so disappointing to see House Republicans make protecting wealthy tax cheats their top legislative priority.
I will continue to work with anybody from either party, in Congress or in the states, to implement my economic agenda and build our economy from the bottom up and middle out. And I am convinced America’s best days are ahead.
The blessing and curse of American politics is the fact that the voters have extremely short-term memories.
Part of this is due to our dysfunctional media and the 24-hour news cycle that seemingly moves on from a story as soon as the big wigs decide it is time to do so. The other part is that so many of us are simply involved in getting by day by day that it's hard for us to think back one month, six months, even one year, and try and remember exactly what we were doing. Take that collective amnesia and amplify it by 330 million Americans and we as a nation struggle to recall just how bad things were when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took office in January of 2021. For the record, less than 14 million Americans had even received their first dose of the vaccine, 95,000 people lost their lives to COVID-19 in January alone, unemployment was 6.7%, only 46% of our nation's students were engaged via in-person learning, and roughly 1/3 of all small businesses had shut their doors, some temporarily, but for some the closure would become permanent. Thanks to the Trump's administration's complete and utter incompetence, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were left with a massive mess to clean up and little to no time to do it.
Fortunately, the adults were back in charge. With the administration correctly making vaccine distribution its top priority, everything else fell into place. And while we rightly focus on the lowest unemployment numbers in a half-century, it cannot be overstated just how critical the rebirth of small businesses have been for not only those jobs but also for our economy as a whole. That 10.5 million new small businesses number is massive and will continue to grow as a result of the Biden-Harris administration's policies, polices that provided countless small business owners with over $154 billion they needed to jump start their businesses as the U.S. gradually worked its way out of the pandemic. These small businesses are often the lifeblood of local communities and having that corner shop or clothing store opening or re-opening sends a signal to the neighborhood that things are back to normal. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris bet big on American small businesses and American small businesses came through with flying colors.
That's a critical difference between today's two major political parties. While the GOP is still obsessed with its trickle-down economic bullshit, Democrats understand that it is the grit and determination of everyday people that actually creates jobs, not the giving of multimillion dollar tax breaks to CEOs who use it to buy back their own stocks. And it is these true job creators in their starting of small businesses who simply need a helping hand in getting going. That's where Democrats succeed. So the next time a Republican says that they know what's best for the economy, ask them for proof. Ask them how and why Democratic presidents always create more jobs than their Republican counterparts. Ask them how and why the Trump administration chose to distribute over $84 billion in fraudulent PPP loans rather than address the small businesses that needed the money most. And ask them how exactly the $1.9 trillion Republican tax cuts in 2017 eventually led to Trump being the worst jobs president since Herbert Hoover.
Don't be surprised if they don't answer.
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