USAT’s Scott Patterson Covers the Neglected Topic of Business Formation, But Not Particularly Well
To say that the statistics concerning new business formation during the past few years haven't been very good would be a major understatement. USA Today's Scott Patterson deserves some credit for even looking at the topic. It is tailor-made for neglect by the rest of the establishment press. When government policies lean towards lower taxation and regulation, policies left-leaning journalists tend to oppose, net business formations generally grow, and they'd rather not report it. In the high-tax, high-regulation environments they favor, net business formation slows considerably — and again, they'd rather not report it. On the plus side, Patterson surfaced the biggest reason — “a huge amount of uncertainty” — why net small business formation is lagging. That said, the USA Today reporter showed that he (and his editors, if they actually looked at his submission) could use a bit of a tutorial on what some of the numbers published by Uncle Sam's Bureau of Labor Statistics really mean. For example, he took “establishments less than one year old” to mean the same thing as, in his words, “new businesses started up.” Additionally, to get his arms around the entire picture, Patterson should have brought out the other side of the business formation equation, namely business deaths. Here are several paragraphs from Patterson's Sunday evening report , with a headline that doesn't tie in very well to the underlying topic: Small businesses, crucial to growth, face challenges
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on June 13, 2011. Filed under