Every now and then, federal lawmakers are seized with budget cutting zeal, which inspires them to start hunting for wasteful spending in federal programs. That sort of thing is going on right now, in both the House and the Senate. Late last month, the House Committee on Small Business held a hearing on whether certain [...]

Last week, the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship held its own oversight hearing to examine fraud, waste, abuse and duplication at the Small Business Administration. Perhaps the largest difference between this hearing and that held before the House Small Business Committee a week earlier was that this hearing focused early on fraud. Because [...]

Of everything the federal government does that is supposed to work in support of small businesses, the one that is perhaps most direct is federal procurement. Not only is it the most direct, it has the potential to be the most effective. The best and most rational way for small businesses to increase their revenues [...]

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 [...]