Where's the help for N.J. small businesses?

The financial crisis that began on Wall Street and spread to Detroit and corporate America has officially found its way to Main Street. The tsunami battering our economy has now breached the largest and most important segment of our economy — America's entrepreneurs. Small-business owners are hunkering down, worrying about sales, cutting back on investment and growth plans and even beginning to cut jobs.

The impact can now be seen all across the American landscape and in town after town here in New Jersey. Because not only are small businesses the major source of new jobs, they're also the lifeblood of their communities. Small-business owners support local charities, community groups, youth sports, television, radio, newspapers and more.

But when Congress crafted and President Obama signed an economic stimulus package designed to pull our economy from the brink, very little was done to support our small businesses. While ladled with pork and bailout cash for bureaucracies, the recovery plan targets precious few resources on small business. This snub will be felt in New Jersey with more than 51 percent of the state's workforce employed by a small business.

Despite all the speeches and soaring rhetoric about helping hardworking small business owners, when you look at the facts, the stimulus plan supported by a majority of New Jersey's congressional delegation does very little for small employers here at home that are struggling.

Certainly, some initiatives are a step in the right direction. The proposal includes an extension of increased small business expensing for 2009, relief from the alternative minimum tax and support for Small Business Administration lending programs. These provisions are a good start, but in the current economic climate, we're asking small business to ride out a Category 5 storm with little more than a life vest.

Entrepreneurs in New Jersey need real support and significant incentives for the investments necessary to fuel an economic recovery. These incentives must be coupled with significant shortterm tax relief to help small businesses and their customers through the current economic crisis, and then to build a sustained recovery in the future.

To do that, Congress needs to focus on policies that reflect what small-business owners and their employees actually need, as well as solutions that keep jobs here today, and create new jobs for tomorrow.

Laurie Ehlbeck New Jersey State Director

National Federation of Independent Business