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To: MulhollandDrive who wrote (273306)	1/9/2004 3:05:05 PM
From: laura_bush	Respond to of 436258

Good links and you're right about the self-employed, including home-based businesses. Mine's a sub S corp. You're also correct about few skill sets/career experiences being adaptable to self-employment. This "household employment" statistic is something that Larry Kudlow dreamed up, if I'm not mistaken. They like him over at the Labor Dept ... as well as throughout the Bush administration, as he continuously points out on his CNBC teevee show. lb

To: MulhollandDrive who wrote (273306)	1/10/2004 2:09:38 AM
From: GraceZ	Respond to of 436258

i think you make some valid points, however i think it's questionable to extrapolate from your or your husband's own personal experience and project onto others The stats from the links you posted support my experience. I also work for quite a few businesses large and small so I'm not taking just mine and my husband's experiences and extrapolating them. A huge number of jobs exist and continue to exist in small or single person companies. The fact that they have a high failure rate isn't material to my point. If one in 20 makes it past x number of years, then maybe 1 in 5000 of that 1 in 20 makes it to mid cap size then that one firm can wind up creating thousands of new jobs. And not just in that particular firm, in all the related firms that are vendors to that company. All the companies that are listed on all the exchanges were startups at some point. This is where companies (and jobs) come from. the last jobs report was dismal no matter how you slice it. Dismal for whom? We have a huge discrepancy in labor costs with the rest of the world. paper that over by concluding that the new jobs are 'self generated' (and undocumented) is pollyann-ish to the extreme, I was simply explaining how there can be a discrepancy between the household survey and the establishment survey because the lack of inclusion of self employed and contract workers in the establishment survey. Most of the contract workers I know who were laid off were hired back as independents from the same firm that laid them off. One women I know was let go on a Friday and came back as a freelancer on Monday. Meanwhile the big media company she worked for made big headlines for laying off so many employees. They still haven't hired anyone back officially. Same with my brother-in-law the IT guy. He's writing software in his own company for the two firms he got laid off from. Companies need the work done, but they don't want the burden of employees. I didn't become self employed because I wanted to start a business. I was forced to because I work in an industry where almost everyone is self employed. My clients, their clients and their client's clients all run their own businesses and these businesses change rather rapidly in size from peak to trough. They merge and then split. Someone is always going out on their own and someone else is going in with so and so. It follows the ad cycle which has just recently bottomed. The final customer is frequently a rather large company or institution. I've worked for numerous companies that are Fortune 500 firms, indirectly through my clients. What big companies do when they are reluctant to hire employees is hire smaller firms to do what they used to do inside. I've been through several cycles of companies taking work "in house" and then outsourcing it. I can think of numerous business to business industries that operate pretty much the way mine does, with small flexible companies. (even if it's selling junk on ebay and call that a business <g>) I use vendors on EBAY all the time. Occasionally I ask them about biz if I get to speak with them in person. Some of those guys sell more than a small hardware store does in a given year with a tenth of the overhead. I wouldn't knock EBAY it's turning out to be a tremendous business generator. independent contractors, sole proprietors, small corp (s or c) all file income tax returns...why is it so hard to track the number of "new" jobs being generated by these entities? (not asking you personally, just wondering out loud) The IRS, of course, has all that data. They publish it a year or so after the returns are in. The establishment survey and the household survey are done prior to when a new company might file it's first return so there is a considerable lag. If you are like most of my clients you file an extension. If you don't have employees you don't need a tax number unless you incorporate. Notice Bernake was out almost immediately saying that the low job creation number was caused by people that were so discouraged they left the work force. Imagine that, a Fed governor out talking down the employment situation. Notice that bond yields fell sharply almost immediately after having spent a whole week sneaking up. Do you think he saw that reaction coming?