Politics & Power Quote by Allyson Schwartz

Calling small businesses the "economic engine" is classic political compression: it shrinks a sprawling, messy economy into a single, reassuring metaphor that fits on a stump-speech banner. Allyson Schwartz isn’t just praising entrepreneurs; she’s positioning them as the safest possible protagonist in American economic storytelling. Unlike Wall Street, unlike "big government", unlike multinational corporations, small businesses carry an almost unassailable moral halo: local, hardworking, community-rooted. That halo does a lot of rhetorical labor here.

The line stacks three promises in quick succession - jobs, innovation, opportunity - to cover the full ideological map. "Creating jobs" speaks to immediate anxiety. "Exploring innovation" flatters the aspirational, tech-forward mythos without committing to any specific policy. "Expanding opportunities" signals mobility and fairness, a nod to voters who want growth to feel broadly shared. It’s a tricolon designed for applause, not debate.

The subtext is coalition-building. By invoking "Americans in every community across the Nation", Schwartz converts small business from an interest group into a national identity project. It implies that policies framed as "pro-small business" are automatically pro-community, and by extension, that opponents are standing against neighborhoods and livelihoods. Notice what’s absent: wages, labor power, market concentration, or the fact that many "small businesses" struggle precisely because of structural forces beyond grit. The quote functions less as economic analysis than as permission structure: whatever comes next - tax credits, deregulation, SBA funding - can be sold as patriotic maintenance on the engine.