With less than a week before the election, the Biden-Harris administration is still deploying surrogates to make the case for its record on the economy.
Isabel Casillas Guzman, head of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) and a member of President Biden’s cabinet, traveled to Durham on Tuesday to highlight small business growth in North Carolina under Biden and Harris and meet with local business leaders to offer resources available to entrepreneurs through the SBA. The visit culminated in a roundtable discussion with Mayor Leonardo Williams and Operation HOPE founder and CEO John Hope Bryant hosted at the North Carolina Central University School of Business.
The state of the economy is a galvanizing issue this election cycle. Biden, and now Vice President Harris, have struggled to make a winning issue out of their economic record while on the campaign trail even though inflation is down, unemployment is relatively low, and the September jobs report defied expectations. Guzman opened her remarks with a firm rebuke of the negative narrative.
“The economic recovery in this country has been strong,” Guzman said.“Sentiment is charged right now, but in terms of the actual data, our economy has performed really strong. Small businesses have really been the ones charging this.”
More than 630,000 new small businesses in North Carolina were filled with the SBA in the last four years. According to Guzman, Black and Latino businesses are at the forefront of the small business “boom.” SBA lending to Black-owned small businesses has tripled under the Biden-Harris Administration, while Latino-owned small businesses have seen 2.5 times greater lending. Missy Lane’s Assembly Room and Kate’s Korner both leveraged SBA loans to start and grow their operations.
“We are finally returning to a time, after 10 years of decline, where our new business starts are outpacing closures, where you’re seeing employment generated by young firms,” Guzman said. “The decline was scary for our country and our future because you can’t build an economy without strong entrepreneurship.”
According to the SBA website, “most manufacturing companies with 500 employees or fewer, and most non-manufacturing businesses with average annual receipts under $7.5 million, will qualify as a small business.” Two-thirds of the 16 million new jobs created since 2021 nationwide came from small businesses, with a growing number of jobs created by minority entrepreneurs.
But the investment in those entrepreneurs remains inequitable. The lack of available startup capital restricts potential revenue growth, limiting opportunities for minority firms to compete in the market. Guzman emphasized the SBA’s focus to ensure that “check writers look like the businesses seeking funding.”
“The fact is that these are the exact same people—women, Black founders, brown founders–who are under invested in this economy,” Guzman said. “They cannot achieve the same employment creation if they don’t have the affordable capital to be able to really grow their businesses to the next level.”
The minority population is poised to become the majority within the decade, but Bryant, who served as an advisor to three U.S. presidents, worries that those same minority groups are losing out on building long-term generational wealth. He spoke bluntly about financial literacy being the “civil rights issue of this generation.”
“We confuse cash flow with making money,” Bryant said.
Bryant’s team at Operation HOPE built a tool for tracking credit scores by zip code across the country. Credit scores are used to evaluate whether a person is eligible for personal or business loans. According to Bryant, the average credit score for Black Americans in the United States is 620, the lowest of any group in America. Operation HOPE works with large firms such as Spotify and Dow Jones to close the financial gap in under-resourced communities.
“Even if you want to distribute money like a socialist, you gotta first collect it like a capitalist,” Bryant said.
Mayor Williams on stage with a member of the Biden-Harris administration should come as no surprise. Residents have become accustomed to seeing pictures of Williams shouldering up next to federal officials in the runup to the election and before.
Williams brought the issue of the economy home for the Durham audience. He said revitalizing historic neighborhoods like Hayti and Black Wall Street, and providing opportunities for Durham’s youth, were high priorities. Williams highlighted the city’s collaborations with Durham Technical Community College, calling the school a “workforce development engine,” and said forging partnerships with groups such as Operation HOPE would create new possibilities for Durham residents who were ready to take advantage of them.
“If you come to Durham, you live in Durham, and you say, I want to make a living for myself and my family, then I want to make sure you know where the resources are to make that happen,” Williams said. “I want to make sure that all you have to do is put in the effort. The resources should not be hard to find or hard to attain, and that’s why we’re here today.”
Carline Jules, a single mother, said during the Q&A that one of her biggest regrets was not teaching financial literacy to her son Jaden, a former Riverside High School student, who now works for the investment firm Dow Jones. She pressed Williams and Bryant on the need to teach financial literacy to the city’s youth after hearing about a program Dow Jones was set to launch with Operation HOPE where students would have free access to the Wall Street Journal, which Dow Jones owns, and guidance on how to understand the financial insights the newspaper offers.
Bryant was surprised to hear a reference to the program, which has not yet officially launched, but was captivated enough by Jules’s story to pledge on the spot to donate $100,000 in WSJ subscriptions and make Durham the pilot school system for the first-of-its-kind program, receiving a rousing applause from the audience.
On the heels of Bryant’s offer, Williams said there will be more speakers, and more resources, coming to Durham in the future.
“This series is going to make sure that every single person in this city, if you want, if you put in the effort, will have access to every resource you need to be successful in your own respective right,” Williams said. “But if you’re lazy, then you’re going to be allergic to this hustle.”
Follow Reporter Justin Laidlaw on X or send an email to [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].
This post was originally published on here
