The Economic Recovery Continues: Businesses Are Being Destroyed Faster Than They Are Being CreatedMichael Snyder Personally, I write about our long-term economic decline nearly every day, but even I had no idea that businesses were being destroyed faster than they were being created. According to the Brookings Institution, this first started happeningin 2009 Bush Sr.: 11.3 As you can see, this is a problem that has been building for decades and that has accelerated under the Obama administration. We are strangling small business creation to death, and as a result the number of Americans that are self-employed just keeps going down. Just check out this chart Meanwhile, the economic recovery is continuing in the corporate world as well. On Tuesday, we learned that Office Depot is going to be closing 400 stores. Why would that happen if the economy was actually getting better? When this was announced, shares of Office Depot rose about 20 percent. I can never understand why that happens. You would think that when a business makes an announcement that essentially says our business is failing that it would cause people to dump the stock. In any event, this comes on the heels of an announcement by Staples back in March that it was going to shut down 225 stores in the United States and Canada. So where will we buy our pens and paper from now on? If the economy really was recovering, you would think that demand for office supplies would actually be on the rise. But the only places where the economy is recovering is in places such as Washington D.C., New York City and San Francisco. Those at the top of the pyramid are doing well, but almost everyone else in the country is really suffering right now. When you kill off small businesses and the entrepreneurial spirit, it tends to increasingly funnel money to the very top of the food chain. And this is precisely what is happening in America at this point. In a recent article, Charles Hugh Smithincluded a chart that shows how average household net worth in the U.S. breaks down by quartile Bottom 25%: $4,600 As you can see, the bottom 50 percent are really not that much above zero at all. In the old days, it seemed like almost everyone was middle class in America, but now that is rapidly changing. We can see this increasing divide in the real estate market as well. According toBloomberg, sales of million dollar homes are booming, but sales of homes at the low end are plunging So this explains why it is almost impossible to find an affordable home in San Francisco, but the overall homeownership rate in the United States has dropped to the lowest level in 19 years. But even in our wealthy enclaves there are signs of deep economic trouble. For example,in New York City the number of homeless children has soared to a new all-time high The only recovery being experienced in America is the one that is happening on Wall Street, in boardrooms in Silicon Valley and in the halls of power in Washington. In the rest of the country, retail stores are closing at the fastest pace that we have seen since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, 20 percent of all families do not have a single member that is employed and49 million Americans are dealing with food insecurity. There is no way that we are ever going to have a broad-based economic recovery in this nation if we continue to destroy small businesses. They are the lifeblood of any economy and they are the primary engine of job creation. Sadly, our politicians seem completely clueless about all of this. So they will continue to do the same things that they have always been doing and then wonder why the economy never seems to turn around. This article first appeared here at the Economic Collapse Blog. Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here. 