If you wanted to support a business in your community through a severe economic downturn, there are only two ways you could do that directly. You would have to either give the business owner money to invest in his business (equity capital) or you would have to buy things from that business. Most people are [...]

Those forms on Everything-You-Could-Possibly-Imagine.gov all say that somebody reads each and every submission but we have no way of knowing, really.

And even if they do, the odds of those emails being read by somebody who matters, somebody who is in a position to evaluate a new idea on the merits and maybe take it to the President and say, “Excuse me, sir, but here’s something that I don’t believe we’ve considered … ”

… those odds are very slim. Let’s face it: all the evidence suggests that they don’t really want to know what we think. We all know that, even though they would be much happier if we pretended we didn’t.

It seems pretty clear that the Obama Administration wants businesses to start hiring again and that they want that to happen really badly. The President has been doing a certain amount of campaigning to let citizens know what he’s been doing to deal with an unemployment rates that is stubbornly hovering at around 10%. It’s [...]

Meanwhile, everywhere else you look — whether it is at social safety nets or whether it is at a National Broadband Plan or whether it is at the push to increase U.S. exports — there appears to be no place in Obamaland for the sturdy American microbusiness.

In many ways, that really doesn’t matter.

Microbusinesses have managed to grow in number and increasing importance in the U.S. economy without a shred of support from the federal government and I would imagine they will continue to do so.

On the other hand, I’ll confess I’m disappointed.

A couple of weeks ago, when we looked at how the economy was doing, we saw signs of recovery that did not seem to have penetrated to the level of the small business economy. That state of being persists, according to a new set of numbers released over the last couple of weeks by almost [...]

In other words, microbusinesses are small and that’s why we don’t get what we need.

Except for those microbusinesses that are not small (in revenue, if not in head count). The high earners “prove” that success is possible with what’s already there, which is why we still don’t get what we need.

And, if we point out that those few high-earning microbusinesses are the exception that prove the rule, and that microbusinesses may be too low-revenue to care about but they are too numerous to ignore, we get vague promises that somebody will look into it.

Last week’s Labor Department report that the economy added 162,000 jobs last month has prompted a certain amount of political happy dancing, justified or not. Even accounting for the 42,000 temporary workers hired by the Census Bureau and the labor market action that can be considered as delayed from February, the news is still some [...]

Last week, the SBA Office of Advocacy released the latest in its series of Quarterly Indicators briefs, this time reporting on the fourth quarter of 2009. So, now, I get to throw a bunch of numbers at you, the good news being that there will not be a quiz when I’m done. The Commerce Department [...]

When the financial markets collapsed and small business lending froze, one set of heroes of the day was the nation’s microlenders. In response, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act included enough money to support $50 million in microloans, an unprecedented infusion of funding for the federal government. Unfortunately, microfinance organizations recently seem to be facing [...]

Nobody is doing the happy dance exactly but there are some rather more cheerful noises coming from hither and yon with respect to economic prospects in the near term. Economy watchers don’t expect a return to truly robust growth but, after what the U.S. economy endured during 2009, any sort of growth is welcome. So, [...]