Recovery? Only in your wildest flights of fantasy

And that goes double if you’d even consider trying to pay someone to be your "employee."

If this is a recovery, how come every mini mall has vacant storefronts, yet rental rates don’t seem to have dropped a bit? If everyone wants to "help small businesses," how come every month brings new and more expensive taxes and regulations, euphemized by the politicians as necessary to "maintain state and municipal services at current levels"?

I love Charles Hugh Smith’s "Cargo Cult" comparison of the way Barack Obama and other never-ran-a-yogurt-stand politicians keep chanting their mantra that "Small business is the engine of American job creation" — as an introduction to their latest scheme to churn out another hundred million in "green energy" grants.  As though these guys have a clue — as though they’ve ever done a slow burn while watching taxman after regulator after state auditor after zoning code enforcement officer come through the doors, issuing them citations for putting up the wrong kind of sign, trying to hold a parking lot sale without a "special permit," making a mistake on their quarterly payroll tax returns — keeping you busy while the shoplifters steal you blind and the woman whose kid ran through your shop breaking everything in sight sues YOU for the child’s emotional trauma.

The saddest tales I hear, one after another, are of small businessmen required to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to upgrade their premises to meet the "new codes," only to find themselves harassed by city meter maids ticketing their customers’ cars downtown after dark when all the lawyers have gone home and "Frogeez" is the only location still open in an eerie, windblown urban ghost town that could be a set for "On the Beach"; the foreign car repair guy whose state tax auditor fined him hundreds of dollars because he installed a turn signal bulb for a regular customer free of charge when he "should have" charged that customer $6 and remitted the 48 cents sales tax.

"Green energy" grants are a great way to transfer more of the looted income of productive Americans to politically connected hustlers who know how to throw together a grant proposal for a scheme that would get laughed out of town by any free market investors, but explain to me how they’re supposed to help the pizza place, the dry cleaners, the book store, the dress shop, the shoe repair guy, who have all had to cut back on their "help" and are now determined to close up shops as soon as their lease comes up for renewal.

America is still full of would-be entrepreneurs, from the guy running the "car detailing" wash-and-vacuum service out of the van parked on the street corner, who suddenly can’t remember how to habla ingles when someone asks him for his business license, to the presumably out-of-work characters scanning the bar codes on the used books at the thrift shops, hoping to find something they can buy for a buck and sell online for $6.50. God bless them; I honor them for trying SOMETHING, but they sure ain’t about to go rent a storefront and lay out thousands of dollars in license and permit fees just to open their doors and have the "payroll tax" brigade and the health and fire inspectors come swarming.  

Recovery? Read Charles Hugh Smith’s "Why Small Business Isn’t Hiring And Won’t Be Hiring."