While most Americans are familiar with the financial terms “bull” and “bear,” a lesser-known animal metaphor economists like to use is “gazelle.” A gazelle is a small business that, like the animal, is known for being lean and swift.  Most small businesses stay small, but not the gazelles; they run fast. Unfortunately, America’s gazelles are now under attack, and the hunter is the U.S. government.

Bigger than Main Street mice but smaller than Wall Street elephants, gazelles are generally defined as young start-up companies that are growing at least 20% per year, meaning they are more than doubling their revenues over a four-year period. During good economic times, gazelles account for a staggering amount of job growth in America. The Economist recently cited a statistic that almost defies reason; from 1980-2005, firms less than five years old created 40 million net new jobs, representing virtually 100% of private sector job growth during that period. In other words, big businesses stayed roughly the same size, while the gazelles hired and hired.

Unfortunately, the story has been very different lately.The gazelles are simply not hiring, and following the “DUH” school of economics, look no further than America’s recent changes in federal regulatory policy to see why.  Horribly over reaching legislation such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 have had the unintended but incredibly ignorant consequence of cutting small businesses, and consequently the gazelles, off from markets and making it increasingly difficult for them to access capital. Capital is the gas of business, and a Ferrari without gas is nothing more than an expensive coffee table.

There are generally three ways a small business can obtain the capital it needs to grow. First, it can launch itself on the stockmarket, through an IPO (initial public offering). Second, it can pursue conventional commercial bank lending. And third, it can seek private equity.

So if you want to kill the gazelles, then the perfect plan would be to make all three of these options overly difficult. Amazingly,that is precisely what has happened over the past decade, and it’s not the work of an archenemy, but of our own federal government.  Jumbo Liners crash, so Washington rushes to regulate the small planes. Sarbanes-Oxley, which was passed after the Enron and WorldCom scandals, has made it incredibly tough for small businesses to go public. Dodd-Frank,intended to regulate large banks “too big to fail”, acting in tandem with arisk averse OCC, have made Main Street banks wary of lending to the gazelles. Finally, the tax code is pretty harsh on deducting private investment losses, and recent years have seen private investment in the gazelles retreat.

We need a Feed the Gazelles bill to restart our magnificent job machine.