Self-Employed Crushed By Big Government since 2007

#8: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 16.6 million Americans were self-employed back in December 2006. Today, that number has shrunk to 14.5 million.

Image: www.flickr.com

Source: USA Today

via www.businessinsider.com

Berk: What happened after 2007? Professor Richard Roll said it well;
"Markets are forward-looking, and in 2007, global market participants began to notice a major sea change washing ashore in many countries. Reversing the trend of at least the previous decade, the private sector's fraction of GDP began to perceptibly decline relative to the public sector's fraction. This phenomenon was observable in Europe, Latin America, and North America—especially in the United States, where the public expenditure bailouts that began the Bush administration and continued into 2009 brought the largest deficits in US history. Other public sector plans, such as health care reform, promised to divert even more spending from the private sector to the public sector in the United States and elsewhere.