As the largest backer of business loans in the United States, the Small Business Administration strengthens the American economy by enabling small businesses to function effectively.

Slave trading across the Atlantic Ocean provided revenue for northern ports in American colonies and a labor source for plantations in the American South.

Slaves constituted a valuable kind of private property that could be traded or used to provide labor, usually at less cost than hiring free labor.

The action against GM brought the tactic of sit-down strikes and their effectiveness to the attention of the general public.

Virtually every business, from grocers to jewelers, depends on the shipment of materials and goods to operate.

The Sherman Antitrust Act was meant to protect consumers from monopolistic business practices that could drive up prices by eliminating competition.

Shays’s Rebellion revealed the conflicting interests of farmers in rural areas and merchants along the coast of the new United States.

At best, sharecropping families, often African Americans, made a few hundred dollars per year.

The American sewing machine industry was one of the first industries to use nearly interchangeable parts and mass production techniques.

Until the 1960’s, the American economy was dominated by industry and manufacturing.

The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States immediately disrupted the work of businesses housed in the World Trade Center, as well as the airlines whose planes were used as weapons by the terrorists.

The Seneca Falls Convention started the struggle for woman suffrage and launched the women’s rights movement, which eventually resulted in dramatic changes in women’s roles in the business world.

The SEC helps maintain the structural integrity of American capital markets by regulating the flow of information about public companies and by enforcing securities laws.

The U.S. Secret Service is one of the country’s oldest federal law-enforcement agencies.

As one of the pioneers of the mailorder retail industry and a leading retailer of the twentieth century, Sears, Roebuck introduced or popularized a number of innovative business practices in its efforts to adapt to changing markets.

Savings and loan associations are similar to banks but offer a somewhat narrower range of services because of government restrictions and their traditional emphasis on saving and lending money.

Sales taxes are a burden to businesses in the sense that they must be collected by the retailer, whose cost of collection must be considered as a cost of doing business.

According to Webster’s New World Dictionary, synergy is the positive result that occurs when “the simultaneous action of separate agencies have greater total effect than the sum of their individual effects.” Management professor Stephen Robbins relates positive and negative synergy to business in the following way...

As defined by sweatshopwatch.org, a sweatshop is a “workplace where workers are subject to extreme exploitation, including the absence of a living wage or benefits, poor working conditions, and arbitrary discipline.” The difficulty in defining sweatshop is the word extreme.

Sustainable growth and development, sometimes referred to as sustainability, was defined by the Brundtland Commission (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987) as ECONOMIC GROWTH that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

Supply-side economics centers on the idea that lower marginal tax rates increase peoples’ incentives to work. First articulated by economist Arthur Laffer in 1974, supply-side economics increases labor productivity by allowing workers to keep more of their added INCOME. This, in turn, increases taxable output and income, resulting in greater revenue for government.

The supply rule is a two-part set of theoretical guidelines for businesses in determining whether to produce and how much to produce. According to the supply rule, in the long run (when all RESOURCES are variable and subject to change), a firm should only produce quantity where marginal revenue (MR) is equal to or greater than marginal cost (MC).

Supply, or the law of supply, is the relationship between price and the quantity supplied of a good or service in a market. The law of supply states there is a positive relationship between price and quantity supplied; that is, the higher the price the greater the quantity supplied, and the lower the price the lower the quantity supplied, ceteris paribus (all other things being equal, or nothing else has changed).

Supplemental Security Income (SSI) is a federally financed and administered program created in 1974. SSI is managed by the Social Security Administration but funded through general tax revenues. Designed to assist needy Americans, SSI provides monthly cash payments to Americans with limited INCOME and resources who are age 65 and older, blind, or disabled.