Something doesn't add up

(Note: We're a small business, many of our friends and clients are small businesses, and we're in advertising, so this post is relevant. Even if it isn't, it's our blog, so we get to decide what goes in it and what doesn't.)

OK, I got this from the Wall Street Journal this morning:

Small business is defined as those with fewer than 500 employees (which, I suppose, makes us a micro-business).

99.7% of companies with employees are small businesses.

Small business employs about half of all private-sector employees and accounts for nearly 40% of the total U.S. private payroll.

Small business has generated 60%-80% of net new jobs over the last 10 years.

There's more, but I think that sets the stage. Because in all the flurry of bailout this and economic stimulus that I don't see anything that will directly benefit small businesses. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's supposed to be a trickle-down effect and banks are supposed to be making loans with a lot of that bailout money, but this is reality here.

A) It's not happening that way and B) even if it did, most small business can't wait for it. Small businesses usually don't have big cash reserves or stock they can sell to generate cash. (Or employee pension plans they can raid.)

Here in Washington, PNC bank just used some bailout money to buy Chevy Chase Bank. Funny, I thought the bailout money was supposed to be used for loans. And as far as stimulus plans go, there is an editorial in today's WSJ that lists some of the 800 pages of pork money that the country's mayors want from Obama's new economic stimulus plan. Don't read it unless you have a high threshold for disgust.

(Hint: $35 million for a music hall of fame in Missouri, $3.1 million for a swimming pool in Tulsa and a $6 million renovation of Surfers Point beach in Ventura, California. It goes on.)

And the banks who were supposed to use at least some of our bailout money to make loans and extend credit are doing just the opposite, tightening down on credit, cutting lines of credit and making credit harder to get.

Whether it's an ad agency, or a pear jelly company of gift shop (two examples cited in the Journal story about how the slump is affecting small business) a small business works with a much smaller amount of cash flow than a big business. And in many cases -- fortunately for us, not ours -- they need to have access to cash, credit or credit cards to buy the raw materials to actually produce what they sell or the products they re-sell. Cash is hard to come by, since sales are down and people are paying more slowly, banks are not trying very hard to make loans and credit card companies are cutting credit limits way back.

Remember those American Express ads they used to run about how they were the company for small businesses and how they wanted to be a partner in your success and yadda, yadda, yadda? Haven't see one lately, have you?

Now, I'm a reasonably intelligent man, except when it comes to knives and pumpkins, and I think I would have noticed if anywhere in any of the talk of economic recovery there was anything directed directly at America's small businesses. I haven't.

But I have seen scores of incompetent, greedy bastards line up at the public teat in hopes of a handout -- of taxpayer money -- whether they deserve it or not.

I'm not saying that big business doesn't need help. One way to look at it is that even though they f***ed up so badly, the impact on everybody else would be chaotic if they totally failed. I understand that.

But the U.S. of A. isn't made up of just big business. In fact, as you see above, there are more small businesses than big ones, accounting for most of the new jobs, employing about half of the employees and paying almost half the payroll. But we're all being ask to sit on the sidelines and watch the buffoons, the slimebuckets and the greedballs get a handout.

WTF?

And in the midst of all this, the New York Yankees are going to spend nearly a half a billion dollars on just three players.

I don't get it. I'm going to go back to bed and pull the covers over my head. Come get me when it's over.

Or when the revolution starts.