Focus on the real job creators

New small businesses are the backbone of today’s economy. We need to help them stabilize and put the governments' focus on helping them to build and expand. We need to stop supporting the large corporations that have reached their growth potential and instead put that energy and money toward the goal of the real job creators.
New businesses that have been in operation for five years or less are shown to be the largest creators of new jobs. "True, most young businesses are small. But most small businesses aren't young. That's where most trip up ....... in the argument that small businesses are the key to job growth.
If jobs are the priority, the target for policymakers should not be size, but age and innovation. This is why so many are concerned with the pathetic state of the U.S. Patent Office. David Kappos, Patent Office director, was asked last year how many jobs he felt were being held back by patent backlogs. His response was "millions".
There's even more to the job conundrum. A surprisingly small number of companies create almost all the new jobs. Economist David Birch calls these companies gazelles, as opposed to elephants, which employ many people but don't create many new jobs, and mice, which employ few people and create few new jobs.
Greece may have more self-employed entrepreneurs than America, but the majority are mice, working in agriculture and street-vendor shops that rarely, if ever, grow.
Birch's findings on the American job market are staggering. Gazelles, which make up around 4% of firms, create as much as 70% of new jobs. During some periods, gazelles created more jobs than the entire rest of the economy, as all other firms shed more jobs than gazelles created. Another characteristic of gazelles: They're very young."
Who are these companies? Google, Facebook, and Netflix, among others. They are not small but they are new and they are growing.

There is room for improvement. The Kauffman Foundation sums this all up nicely:
"Virtually all of the attention among policymakers and the media has focused on the waiting game by larger firms, currently reluctant to take back employees they dismissed, and unwilling so far to begin hiring new employees again … This attention is misplaced. "

The overwhelming source of new jobs is new firms. The key implication for policymakers concerned about restarting America’s job engine, therefore, is to begin paying more attention to removing roadblocks to entrepreneurs who will lead us out of our current (well-founded) pessimism about jobs and sustain economic expansion over the longer run. This much-needed shift in focus cannot come soon enough."