During the postwar years government put this nation to work building roads, bridges, hospitals, schools, energy grids, damns, sewers, power plants, water treatment facilities, etc., i.e., building the infrastructure of modern America without which small businesses would not exist.
Unfortunately, the Republican party has been co-opted by a small group of special interests which has convinced a generation of useful idiots that government plays no role in commerce.
A great Republican president named Dwight D Eisenhower used government to build this nation's interstate system. Eisenhower - a big government Republican & supporter of the New Deal - literally put many towns on the map economically. Indeed, the ability to move goods and people more efficiently across the country lead to unprecedented growth. Do you know what Eisenhower's government workers did with the money they made from their government jobs? They went into stores (small businesses) and bought things. This allowed small businesses to add more jobs (in order to soak up the excess demand). . . which created even more consumers . . . which lead to even more job creation . . . and generated the tax revenues necessary to pay down the massive deficits created by WWII spending (which was a much larger percentage of the GDP than we have now).
The difference between today's Republicans and Dwight Eisenhower is that Eisenhower understood that it is government's job to prime the pump when small businesses lack consumers. It's government's job to build the infrastructure necessary for commerce. If we put Americans to work repairing this nation's infrastructure, than those workers will do exactly what a prior generation of government workers did: buy things from small businesses. . . which will lead to a virtuous cycle of growth.
History will look back on the current Republican obstructionism as one of the greatest crimes in American history.
