Census Data

I'm putting this here now so that I don't lose the link :) U.S. Census Data on Business

I want to explore this data further, especially in light of the fact that government bailouts always focus on the importance of saving Huge enterprises. Fact is, on an initial glance, half of all employment is in firms of less than 500 people.

Also, is it just me, or does the reporting of these statistics seem to give the impression that bigger is more important. Notice the BIG numbers are actually summaries for firms of over 500 employees - making it look like this portion is much larger than it really is. No similar summary is given for firms between 1-499 employees.

Notice also that the 17,646,062 self-employed people are not included under the column "Paid Employees" further skewing the impression that firms over 500 are what is really important.

Here is the U.S. Census link: http://www.census.gov/epcd/www/smallbus.html#EmpSize