This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, June 10th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

In addition to the human toll of this pandemic, small businesses took a big hit.

Some of them just went out of business.

Does cleaning up state and local regulatory burdens

hold the key to local economic recoveries?

Cato's Chris Edwards details some of the burdens

that ought to be lifted to get people back to work

and launching new enterprises. Well the pandemic was brutal particularly on

small businesses. American big business did did pretty well but it's small businesses that really got hit.

So for example, there's over 600,000 restaurants in United States or at least there used to be

over 600,000 restaurants in the United States and over 100,000 of them went bankrupt

and out of business permanently due to the recession and pandemic.

So unfortunately a decade ago during a great recession we saw a lot of small businesses go bankrupt and out of businesses and they didn't recover, about 8% of all businesses go disappear every year and so we need a constant

stream of startups to replace those 8% of businesses that fail every year.

And so my new study for Cato called entrepreneurs and regulations,

removing state and local barriers to new businesses,

focuses on this issue of startup businesses.

America needs startups to create jobs,

to create innovation, and I look at some of the government barriers that stand in the way of business startups.

New business creation has been trending downward for some time.

Why is that?

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