The entrepreneurial spirit of the American public is one of our country's last great resources. As the national unemployment rate hovers around 8 percent, our strongest competitors continue to outpace us in education and macroeconomic stability. Helping to keep America afloat in an increasingly competitive global economy is our willingness to start new business ventures -- an asset that, despite only producing a slow jobs "leak," has nearly single handedly kept unemployment from spiraling out of control. Indeed, entrepreneurship is the best answer to the question of how to solve our unemployment problem.
Entrepreneurship has been the driving force of American employment for decades: from 1980 to 2005, new firms (those less than five years old) were responsible for close to all net job growth in the United States. According to the Business Dynamics Statistics data from the U.S. Census Bureau, America's net employment growth rate would be negative without the jobs created by new businesses. And though not every new business can succeed -- in fact, only half of all new firms make it to their fifth year -- cohorts of firms started each year retain, on average, 80 percent of their initial total employment to age five, according to a report from the Kauffman Foundation.
To read the original article: Zach Cutler: Entrepreneurs Are Job Creators
