Free Republic

So my company had a downsize / RIF / layoff and my group got hit. Sad news but hey, it happens. Now I am looking at being an independent IT consultant. Since I have always been an employee, I was wondering if there were any words of wisdom from the Freeper community.

The percentage of Americans that are working for themselves has never been lower in the history of the United States. Once upon a time, the United States was a paradise for entrepreneurs and small businesses, but now the control freak bureaucrats that dominate our society have created a system that absolutely eviscerates them. This is very unfortunate, because by murdering small business, the bureaucrats are destroying the primary engine of job growth in this country. One of the big reasons why there are not enough jobs in America today is because small business creation is way down. As I mentioned...

Here are some charts from Reader Tim Wallace that help explain my report a few days ago that 23% of Small Business Owners (Approximately 6.21 million) Report "No Pay for a Year"; New Zealand, Singapore, US, Best Places to Start and Run a Business The first chart below shows actual employment of covered workers compared to the civilian population and labor force. Covered employees are those eligible for unemployment benefits (working or not). Some are currently collecting those benefits. In the following charts, "covered employment" or "net employment" refers to those with benefits and currently working. Population, Labor Force, Covered...

Conventional wisdom over the last few years has been that, with staff jobs scarce, more of America’s relentlessly entrepreneurial workers have turned to self-employment. The numbers don’t quite bear that out.Here’s a chart, using data from today’s jobs report, showing the percent of employed workers who are self-employed, regardless of whether they are incorporated:Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics The numbers are not seasonally adjusted, which accounts for some of the noise. But even so, the self-employment rate had generally been trending downward over the last year, and has only recently ticked upward.

If your business goes belly up, you might be entitled to some government funds. Pink-slippers applying for unemployment insurance can hope to receive 30% to 60% of their salary from the past 12 to 18 months (up to their state's maximum allowance), and can collect that money for up to 26 weeks. But what about the safety net for busted small-business owners? While each state runs its own unemployment benefit program (each with its own requirements and compensation schemes), there is one general rule of thumb for hard-luck entrepreneurs captured by July's unemployment figures, released Friday: If you pay unemployment...

I haven't spent this much time thinking about economics since college, when it was my second major. I have dedicated the last 15 years primarily to my first major, computer science, and my first love, entrepreneurship. But that has changed in the last six months, although my primary concern still remains entrepreneurship. I was invited by Tim Kane and Bob Litan of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the world's largest foundation dedicated exclusively to the cause of promoting and fostering entrepreneurship, to a small conference of economics bloggers held in Kansas City recently. About 30 of us spent a stimulating...

In 1976, a scandal arose in Sweden when marginal tax rate for self-employed was 102%. Yes, 102%!!! It is not a typo. This was to be known as the "Pomperipossa effect" from a story published on March 3, 1976. The publication led to a stormy tax debate. In the parliamentary election later in the same year the Social Democrat government was voted out for the first time in 40 years, and the tax debate was one of several controversies that may have contributed to the election result.

This week we tackle some rather odd discrepancies in the employment numbers - are we adding jobs or losing them? Then is there a relationship between those numbers and the stock market? Are businesses getting ready to hire and spend money? All good questions, and I will try to shed some light on them as we see if we can fit some rather disparate pieces of the information puzzle together to form a picture that we can recognize. First, there are two different sets of employment numbers. One, the establishment survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), shows we...

John Preussner gets paid more as an independent information-technology consultant than he did working at a full-time job. He has a flexible schedule and gets to meet new people all the time. There's never a dull moment, he said, and that's the problem. "It's sporadic. I'm always job hunting. There are a lot of people competing for those positions," said Preussner, 55, of Schaumburg, who added he'd rather be on a payroll. For Preussner and others who've turned to self-employment, the so-called jobless recovery feels more like one big non-stop hustle. Because businesses burned in the recession remain reluctant to...

<p>For the first time in more than 50 years, entrepreneurs are failing to lead the United States out of recession, government data suggest.</p> <p>The impact is broad. Experts say flagging entrepreneurship might partly explain the wobbly rebound: Fewer start-ups mean fewer new jobs and innovations.</p>