During National Small Business Week, the people in charge want you to think about the heroic small business owner grinding away at their dream. What they don’t want you to think about is the Joint Economic Committee data they dropped at the same time: small businesses with fewer than 10 employees have been shedding jobs for 13 straight months, and the losses in 2025 were 4.5 times worse than during the actual pandemic. Not a little worse. Four and a half times worse.
The tariffs that were supposed to save American business are eating the businesses they were supposed to save. Construction revenue down 18 percent. Hospitality down 15. Manufacturing bleeding. And the official answer from Treasury Secretary Bessent: don’t worry, those fired federal workers can go fill factory jobs. The factories that will exist. Eventually. Once the tariffs work. Which they haven’t.
The cruelty of releasing this data during Small Business Week is almost artful. They know. They just don’t care.