The U.S. economy is the world's largest. I bet you knew that.

But did you know that the world's second largest economy is the U.S. small business economy?

Yes, that's right. In 2004, small businesses generated 50.7% of the $10.2 trillion U.S. economy (about $5.2 trillion), putting it ahead of Japan's $3.8 trillion economy.

Which means, among other things, that U.S. policy makers have not one but two world-leading economies to safeguard.

Against a backdrop of multi-billion dollar bailouts of giant multi-national corporations and financial institutions, it's hard to remember that. I have a strong suspicion that those policy makers forget it on a regular basis.

Of the total small business economy, nonemployer businesses were responsible for generating $887 billion in receipts (about 17%) in 2004. By 2006, the nonemployer segment of the economy was populated by roughly 30 million people, possibly more.

By now, you're probably wondering why I'm throwing all these numbers at you.

It's a well-established fact that the number of nonemployer businesses increases when the economy tanks. We won't have the numbers for a couple of years yet but, when we look back on 2008, I have no doubt at all that we'll see another large spike in self-employment.

And yet, there's little evidence that the policy movers and shakes either know or care about all those single-person businesses, even as they consider how best to respond to this newly-declared recession.

That's a problem.

It's a problem because it ignores one simple, sparkling, ineluctable fact: regardless of how lawmakers will choose to respond to the recession, Americans are already responding, by creating hundreds of thousands - possibly millions - of new nonemployer businesses.

Whether the lawmakers work with that or ignore it will depend, in part, on the degree to which they accept their responsibility for how that other U.S. economy is doing.

[The MicroEnterprise Journal and the Microbusiness News Briefs will be on hiatus from now through the end of the year and will resume publication on January 5, 2009. Happy holidays!]