...Politicians like to say that small companies create two of every three jobs in a given year. That's less impressive when you consider that almost all the 6 million companies in the United States - 99.9 percent of them - are small businesses with fewer than 500 workers. What's more, two-out-of-three masks the fact that most small businesses eliminate more jobs than they create in a given year, either through layoffs, closings or bankruptcy. And many of the rest, the ones that don't shrink or shut down, don't offer much hope for the millions of Americans looking for jobs....