South By North Strategies, Ltd.

TaxVox  summarizes new research into small businesses and taxes.

Small businesses take on an outsized importance in the tax policy debate for two reasons: These firms play into the great American entrepreneurial narrative and, in the current political debate, they are the “job creators.” Raise their taxes, goes the argument, and you further wreck an already-weak economy by discouraging these firms from hiring and investing.
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Well, it turns out most of the firms those pols define as small businesses don’t hire or invest very much at all. There is no question that other companies whose income is reported on individual tax returns do hire and invest (quite a lot in some cases), but they are not small businesses, at least not according to this new definition.
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So what is a small business? The Treasury team, led by Matthew Knittel at the Office of Tax Analysis, defined one as a firm that has combined income or deductions of at least $10,000 but no more than $10 million and one that operates in a businesslike manner. In other words, it has expenses such as wages, office supplies, rent, and the like.

The post then contrasts the Treasury Department definition to that of the Small Business Administration.

This is very different than the Small Business Administration, which uses multiple definitions but can include firms with sales of as much as $35.5 million with as many as 1,500 employees. It also is an effort to distinguish between those who report business income on their individual returns and actual small businesses. Treasury finds that many partnerships, S corporations, and others who file on an individual return don’t meet the small business test—either because they make too much money to be “small” or too little to be a real business.
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Those distinctions are extremely important since many politicians love nothing more than to happily label all firms whose owners report income on their individual returns as iconic small businesses. If nothing else, the Treasury staff analysis shows how bogus that exercise is.
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For example, using tax year 2007 data, Treasury found that of the 23.2 million people who reported income on Schedule C, fewer than half met its small business test—nearly all because they were too small. On average, the excluded firms reported just $7,000 of total income and $4,600 of net income.