Never before. NEVER AGAIN if we have anything to say about it.

American Entrepreneurship: Dead or Alive

America now ranks 12th - not 1st, 2nd, or 3rd - in business startups.

As noted by Gallup: "We are behind in starting new firms per capita, and this is our single most serious economic problem. Yet it seems like a secret. You never see it mentioned in the media, nor hear from a politician."
 It's NOT that more businesses are failing.  Business closings are holding their own.  It's that startups have decreased by nearly half.

As recently as 2008, startups exceeded business failures by six-figures.  But currently available data show what Gallup describes as "an underground earthquake".  Mind you, the "currently available" information from the U.S. Department of Census and Small Business Administration is two years old.

Gallup's Chairman and CEO has a hunch that the revolving door between New York and DC are the reason we don't hear much about statistics like this.

 On one side of that door is an institution that needs votes (no matter who's "in charge" of that institution), while on the other side of the door is an institution that needs the stock market to boom, by illusion if nothing else.  Hence, all we hear is "The economy is coming back."

 This is, as Gallup put it, "the biggest issue of the last 50 years...". Small and medium-sized businesses are and always have been the engine of job creation.  Economic growth and and jobs can't come from innovation until a business model for innovation becomes something customers will buy.  But we follow these pied pipers for the same reason the rats in the German folk-tale did:  the melody is pleasing.

 There's entirely too much in Gallup's Business Report to cover in one update, so as a late night show graphic used to say,

"MORE TO COME".