Economic Doom Boom Update
There are signs the "entrepreneurial slump" may be ending, reports the Washington bureau of the American City Business Journals chain of business weekly newspapers:

The number of Americans running a new business or making plans to start a business fell slightly last year, but there are signs that entrepreneurial activity may pick up soon, according to the latest Global Entrepreneurship Monitor.

The GEM report is an annual study conducted by researchers at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., funded by the Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City, Mo. This year's survey is based on a telephone survey of 7,059 American households, expert questionnaires and national data assembled from various sources. You can find the press release here and here. Here is a link to the full report in a PDF file.

More from the story:

In 2002, 10.5 percent of American adults were engaged in creating or growing a business less than 42 months old - down from 11.7 percent in 2001 and a peak of 16.7 percent in 2000. The decline from 2001 to 2002 is statistically insignificant, the report concludes, and last year's number was higher than it was in 1998, the year that the Internet bubble inspired a three-year boom in entrepreneurial activity. That bubble popped in 2001. "The good news here is that the 2001 slump in entrepreneurship bottomed out in 2002 and may have set the stage for a return to new growth this year," says Carl Schramm, president and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation.

Last year's slight decline in entrepreneurial activity "may simply reflect an ongoing post-boom retrenchment rather than a structural decline," says GEM author Heidi Neck, assistant professor of entrepreneurship at Babson. The GEM survey found that 37 percent of Americans think there will be "good opportunities for starting a business" in the next six months.

This is the fault of the Bush tax cuts!