Leadership Quote by Ellen Tauscher

Ninety-nine percent is the kind of statistic that doesn’t just inform; it recruits. Ellen Tauscher’s line is built to make small business feel not like a niche constituency but the country itself, hiding in plain sight as the overwhelming majority. It’s a politician’s move with a policy wonk’s veneer: cite the Small Business Administration, borrow the authority of government data, and turn an economic claim into a moral one. If almost everyone is “small,” then helping small business becomes less like targeted intervention and more like common sense.

The intent is coalition-building. “Small businesses” compresses a messy range of realities - family restaurants, contractors, startups, gig-adjacent shops - into a single sympathetic protagonist. That framing matters because it lets lawmakers talk about tax breaks, credit access, deregulation, and procurement preferences as job policy rather than favoritism. The subtext: if you want to be pro-jobs, you have to be pro-small business, and if you’re not, you’re out of step with the engine of American employment.

The context is the familiar American economic story politicians love to tell: innovation and grit happening on Main Street, not in boardrooms. It also quietly sidesteps power. Big firms may dominate revenue, lobbying, and market structure, but the metric here is employers and job creation - chosen because it casts the small business owner as the essential voter-hero, and public policy as a matter of keeping that hero alive. The line doesn’t argue; it dares you to disagree with the arithmetic.