From Democracy Journal. Perhaps it has to do with their political weakness. Its an unfortunate, but readily understood story. People do not get support because they do beneficial things, but because they connected:
As the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Kauffman
Foundation have recently reported, businesses under one-year
old—startups—have created an average of three million new jobs each year
for 30 years, more than the net job creation of the whole economy. A
big proportion of those jobs are by self-employed entrepreneurs who
don’t have any employees. Each year some 22 million Americans file
Schedule C to report self-employment income, two million of them for the
first time. Half of these filers report family adjusted gross income of
less than $50,000.
And yet, despite contributing millions of jobs to the U.S. economy,
such businesses are all but ignored by policy-makers. They have no
associations or lobbies. They are largely left out of the agenda of the
President’s Start-up program, which focuses only on rapidly growing,
often older firms, which can take venture capital investment and pay
handsome returns. Small business groups focus on the agendas of small
firms while the Chamber of Commerce and others focus largely on the
perceived needs of big businesses. States still focus on luring large,
established firms.
