The Top 10 Cities Where Small-Biz Jobs Are Growing
Small businesses have been hiring, though at a slower rate than this time last year, according to the Paychex|IHS job index.
For the 11th month in a row, Dallas’s small businesses have shown the most employment gains. The city boasts the top 12-month growth rate at 1.38 percent. Detroit (1.35 percent), San Diego (1.27 percent), Baltimore and St. Louis (both 1.13 percent) round out the top five. Houston’s recent performance is also impressive, with a rebound in growth rates over the past three months compared with declines during the rest of the year.
Related: This Is the Best Time Since the Recession to Get a Small Business Loan
Only five states saw positive gains in employment rates over the past year, and none of them increased by a full statistical point. One notable state is Michigan, which ranks second behind Wisconsin, as the state with the highest employment gains in small businesses since 2004. It also came in second for highest gains in the past year.
The index numbers used by Paychex for cities and states is based on the current small business employment rate as compared with 2004. Paychex uses 2004 as the base period to compare current gains against because it was a year of expansion for small businesses. Below 100, and the rate is lower than in 2004. Above 100, and the rate is higher than in 2004.
The charts below rank the cities and states based on their index levels.
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Number of the Day: $132,900
The cap on Social Security payroll taxes will rise to $132,900 next year, an increase of 3.5 percent. (Earnings up to that level are subject to the Social Security tax.) The increase will affect about 11.6 million workers, Politico reports. Beneficiaries are also getting a boost, with a 2.8 percent cost-of-living increase coming in 2019.
Photo of the Day: Kanye West at the White House
This is 2018: Kanye West visited President Trump at the White House Thursday and made a rambling 10-minute statement that aired on TV news networks. West’s lunch with the president was supposed to focus on clemency, crime in his hometown of Chicago and economic investment in urban areas, but his Oval Office rant veered into the bizarre. And since this is the world we live in, we’ll also point out that West apparently became “the first person to ever publicly say 'mother-f***er' in the Oval Office.”
Trump called Kanye’s monologue “pretty impressive.”
“That was bonkers,” MSNBC’s Ali Velshi said afterward.
Again, this is 2018.
Chart of the Day: GDP Growth Before and After the Tax Bill
President Trump and the rest of the GOP are celebrating the recent burst in economic growth in the wake of the tax cuts, with the president claiming that it’s unprecedented and defies what the experts were predicting just a year ago. But Rex Nutting of MarketWatch points out that elevated growth rates over a few quarters have been seen plenty of times in recent years, and the extra growth generated by the Republican tax cuts was predicted by most economists, including those at the Congressional Budget Office, whose revised projections are shown below.
Are States Ready for the Next Downturn?
The Great Recession hit state budgets hard, but nearly half are now prepared to weather the next modest downturn. Moody’s Analytics says that 23 states have enough reserves to meet budget shortfalls in a moderate economic contraction, up from just 16 last year, Bloomberg reports. Another 10 states are close. The map below shows which states are within 1 percent of their funding needs for their rainy day funds (in green) and which states are falling short.
Chart of the Day: Evolving Price of the F-35
The 2019 National Defense Authorization Act signed in August included 77 F-35 Lightning II jets for the Defense Department, but Congress decided to bump up that number in the defense spending bill finalized this week, for a total of 93 in the next fiscal year – 16 more than requested by the Pentagon. Here’s a look from Forbes at the evolving per unit cost of the stealth jet, which is expected to eventually fall to roughly $80 million when full-rate production begins in the next few years.
