Microfinance in the USA

So I've been reading and writing about the Koch brothers and how they are the epitome of evil and they are doing bad things and they are richer than god and all that. But then I got to thinking about what effect is all this caterwauling going to have on them? Probably none. I mean I hope they fall down the stairs, but that and a dollar will get you cup of coffee. Wait a minute, can you still get a cup of coffee for a dollar? I mean real coffee in a real cup, with a place to sit and drink it? Probably not. Make that two dollars. Whatever. Back to the topic at hand.

There are several things that came together here:

• We have a large number of unemployed people.
• "Everybody" wants big companies to provide lots of good jobs.
• Entrepreneurs create more jobs than big businesses.
• The SBA (The Federal Government's Small Business Administration) considers any company with less than 500 employees a "small business". By that yardstick, a company with a dozen employees doesn't even register, they get the same amount of attention as an individual homeless person, i.e. none.

It seems to me we need more individuals starting their own businesses. Once upon a time I was thinking we needed an ice rink in Hillsboro, so I was talking to the owner of Valley Ice Arena in Beaverton, and he told me that in purchasing the ice rink, he had bought himself a job. I don't know about your area, but we have a proliferation of mobile food vendors (trailers and trucks) establishing themselves in Portland. It seems like there are entire blocks of them in downtown Portland.

Mobile Food Vendors in downtown Portland Oregon

Every one of these operations takes a capital investment of several thousand dollars and employs maybe two or three people.

We need more financing for small time operations like this. Big business isn't going to create more jobs, their job is to be profitable, and if that means eliminating jobs, or shipping them overseas, so be it. If we are going to see job growth in this country, it is going to have to come from the ground up, and for that we are going to need money.

Any job in this country requires an investment of probably fifty to a hundred thousand dollars. An office worker needs a car to get to work, a hundred square feet of office space, probably another 100 square feet of support space, furniture and a computer. An independent construction worker requires a pickup truck and tools. Nobody wants to invest in these kind of operations, too risky, and taken individually they probably are. There are a lot of energetic determined people out there who are plenty willing to work. Problem is energy and determination are not enough. In order to be competitive in America you need the proper tools for the job, and that means a capital investment.

Problem is, few people want to invest in these kind of small time operations, they want to put their money in nice safe investments, investments with a guaranteed return, something they don't have to watch all the time. I can understand that, I'm as guilty as the next person.

Microfinance has been making a name for itself in the third world as way to bring the poor out of poverty. Microfinance in the USA is a different animal, mostly because we are talking about relatively huge sums of money. While a microfinance loan in the third world might be $100, in the USA it is going to be more like $10,000. $10,000 might seem like a lot of money, but in the realm of business, it is small potatoes. That might cover wages for a single McDonald's restaurant for a week.

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.