Small business sidelined in slow recovery from recession

Subject: txt econ mny - sclm -
Reporting from Washington — In every recession over the last three decades, it has been America's small businesses — those Lilliputian companies with fewer than 100 employees — that stepped forward, began hiring and pulled the country out of the mire.

Not this time.

Small firms are on the sidelines, and it's not just because of tight credit from the financial meltdown, as the Obama administration and others have been saying. Rather, a host of factors — some well-recognized and others seemingly unnoticed in the national debate over economic policy — are converging to restrain small-business owners from hiring...

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