And when I see my taxes going down every quarter — well, that means I am going to start investing again.”<br />While much has been made about the stock market’s nearly 14 percent rally since the election, economists say<br />that when it comes to assessing the genuine potential for the United States economy, confidence among small-business owners is a more grounded and forward-looking indicator.<br />“That guy is a junkyard dog, doing his tweets at 3 a.m.<br />and taking on the news media — I just get strength from him,” Mr. Soltis said over a wine-soaked dinner with a large group of his small-business friends and peers from around town.<br />“And now we have seen this huge spike in small-business confidence since the election,” Mr. Korzenik said, pointing to a chart.<br />Of late, the local economy has been recovering as thriving industries like health care have picked up the slack,<br />and the unemployment rate, at 4.7 percent, stands exactly at the national figure of 4.7 percent for February.<br />So for all that General Electric, Caterpillar or Ford Motor talks about building factories<br />and hiring workers, the $18 trillion United States economy will not truly move until the burghers in Toledo and other parts of the country start to invest and add jobs.<br />But all 11 executives agreed: Never in recent years had they been so bullish about their businesses as they were now<br />under a president (and fellow small-business owner, albeit a very rich one) whom they see as one of their own.<br />Which is why Mr. Korzenik was so excited about the recent surge in the small-business confidence index,<br />as measured by the National Federation of Independent Business, the industry’s trade group.
