Too many people on Capitol Hill persist in believing that it makes sense for microbusinesses to do business the way IBM does business, relying on strategies that are complex and paperwork intensive.

But why would we want to do business in ways at which IBM excels and at which we rather spectacularly don’t?

Last month, during Small Business Week, the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship used the occasion to hold an oversight hearing on implementation of the Small Business Jobs Act of 2009. According to the opening statement of Committee Chairwoman Mary Landrieu (D-LA), the Small Business Jobs Act included tax breaks, increased loan limits and [...]

Last week the House Committee on Small Business convened a hearing to re- examine the challenges facing small businesses looking for debt capital and banks looking for credit-worthy small business borrowers. The questions of the day were only what was expected: what is the status of the small business financing market and what can Congress [...]

The U.S. economy has been growing for quite some time and has even been producing jobs. Unfortunately, that job growth has been consistently inconsistent and the word you hear most often on the lips of economists describing the recovery is ‘uneven.’ The Conference Board’s Index of Leading Economic Indicators fell in April 2011, one of [...]

Let’s put it this way: on the day that a representative from the National Federation of Independent Business spoke up at a Senate roundtable on behalf of microbusinesses, I thought we have arrived.

That newfound recognition, that microbusinesses had their own peculiar policy needs and issues, was heady while it lasted.

Looking back, it seems to have lasted for about a minute.

It’s always interesting when one or the other of the Congressional small business committees holds a hearing on an issue that is of critical importance to microbusinesses and manages to get through the entire proceeding without talking about microbusinesses at all. That is essentially what happened earlier this month when the House Committee on Small [...]

Right around tax day, the National Small Business Association (NSBA) released the results of its 2011 Small Business Taxation Survey, because that’s what we all want to do at that time of year: talk taxes. The survey demonstrated yet another instance in which there was a critical microbusiness issue but, evidently, there weren’t very many [...]

Most U.S. business owners make a decision about the legal form of their business at startup and rarely change it within the first few years of operation. That is the principle finding of a new research report, entitled “How Do Firms Choose Legal Form of Organization?”, written by Rebal Cole with funding from the SBA [...]

If we are going to advocate for anything for women, I would think we’d advocate for our own freedom. Freedom from societal sex role scripts, yes, but also freedom from being required to fulfill anybody’s expectations — even those of our female peers.

Freedom means having options. If you don’t like my options, you don’t have to live them. But don’t tell me that I shouldn’t live them, either.

That’s when you’re trying to take my freedom away from me, in the name of fighting for my freedom.

We’ve been hearing about the tax gap for a long time, long before the Internal Revenue Service released its 2001 tax gap estimates back in 2006. The release of those estimates seemed to simply add numbers to what everybody “knew”: small business owners who are not subject to either involuntary withholding or third party reporting [...]