Your research assistant should take it a step further, get ahold of the off-the-top-of-my-head 18 taxes/fees to start a bus in MN.

A revolution's coming, all these people who never had to pay both sides of SS, Medicare, FUTA/SUTA and everything else they never realized companies had to pay.

They could even make the point that Mr. Bean/the Shoemaker/Zapetero wants to LOWER corp. tax from 35% to 30%. And butter up- even tho it won't do any good, but these people want style over substance- Spain.

Have you done a table of these? If not, I'll give it a try over the weekend. Also, percentages of population in poverty are at the lowest levels in a generation, another good thing.

Mr. Hobbs,I have been following you investigation into LLC startups and am in complete agreement with what you are attempting to show.As someone who has had his own small business for twenty years I wonder if there might be even bigger growth in the self-employed ranks than you are imagining.Let me explain;I have been incorporated for ten years,but was also self-employed for ten years prior to incorporation.Here in New York it is quite common to open a business without incorporating.There is a mechanism in this state called the D.B.A. It stands for "doing business as".I do not have firm figures to offer you ,but in my industry,{construction}many more people start off self-employment with this method.For various reasons this is the easiest way to get started.Perhaps for your purposes you might try looking into the one common denominator of DBA's and LLC's that I know of:liability insurance policy sales.I know from personal experience that regardless of the method of forming the business an insurance policy is mandatory.Perhaps other states also have a method of doing business short of incorporation.If this is in fact the case then the self-employment boom you are exploring may be many times more than the LLC data indicate. Good Luck and keep up the good work.

Sandy - My research assistant? Wish I had one!

Chuck - thanks for the stuff you emailed me.

Bruce - good thoughts and suggestons, thanks.

Bill-

I do think there is a movement toward LLCs in the current labor market and I do think that the current tax structure is the primary catalyst.

The only thing that I take issue with is the idea that the household survey being a more accurate portrayal of the job market. While your notion is sound on logic, the Household survey takes into account illegals (of which there are millions ) who are working. This is one of the reasons why the Street tends to follow the Payroll Servey.

As always, the true employement number will pretty much be somewhere between the HS and the PS and I do think the numbers that have been coming out month after month are something to be optimistic about. It can take up to a year or more for employment data from LLCs to make it into the PS (talk about your lagging indicators!). And I think that in a historical sense, unemployment figures as a whole (not just the much touted '%') will be revised downward to take account of the explosion of LLC that you have pointed out. Of course, as a political tool, that doesn't help an incumbent.

My question to you is this: Have you found an independant organization or group (one of which is seen as non-partisan) that keeps track of not just the LLCs but have some insight into the number of people working for them in "real time" (ie, one without an 18 month lag time)? I am looking for some place that I can point to to present a truer sense of the evolving labor market.

I meant the one who called you. But you knew that.

Besides - the blogosphere is your research assistant.

SaWb - I don't know of such an organization. Perhaps my work will catalyze someone into doing that work.

Sandy P: "the blogosphere is your research assistant." Perfect! That captures the essence of what makes blogging different than traditional-media journalism.