Over the weekend, I had an opportunity to attend a dinner at which one of the speakers, a local boy made good, was a member of the Obama Administration. He described the environment in which he worked perfectly. “Washington, D.C. is an interesting place,” he said, “that is completely surrounded by the real world.” Truer [...]

This new recession is a really deep one, resulting in unprecedented numbers of long-term unemployed putting an unprecedented strain on that system of social safety nets I was talking about last week.

“We have a work-based safety net without any work,” said Timothy M. Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the article.

Nobody knows how long it’ll be before the jobs return but it’s pretty clear that what we’re doing right now — lurching along with these costly, last-minute extensions of unemployment insurance — is unsustainable.

In some ways, it’s probably a good thing that the government doesn’t seem to have noticed any of this yet. If they had, they would almost certainly have decided to regulate it in some way, under the mistaken notion that all those poor freelancers need to be protected … whether they want to be protected or not.

At the same time, this new labor market movement could use some support — especially in this economy.

Small businesses will need to sell to the federal government because the federal government buys more of everything than everybody. In order to expand their capacity to sell to the federal government, small businesses need to borrow money.

Then they’ll create a mess of jobs, which will get all those unemployed people off our backs. And you wonder why we love small businesses!

But will they? The prediction that this will be another jobless recovery is still with us and, if that’s the case, then policy makers seem to be barking up a whole forest full of the wrong tree.

There are certain issues that perpetually perplex the U.S. Congress. Some of them are large, headline-grabbing issues, like access to affordable health care and ending the conflict in Iraq. Others are much smaller but no less vexing. One such issue is the question of classification of independent contractors. You wouldn’t think such a seemingly simple [...]

The Labor Department is hostile to self-employment, largely because it concerns itself with workers who are employees. Employees have certain rights that are protected by the Labor Department. Independent contractors and those self-employed types take work away from employees, when employees ought to have first dibs on it.

Well, after all, it is the Labor Department.

Treasury, and in particular, the IRS, has no such biases. All they care about is that everybody pay their taxes.

In fact, I have come across taxpayer advice on the IRS web site instructing people who accept bribes, commit fraud, and rob people of their property not to forget to pay their taxes. Who knew the IRS was such a tolerant bunch?

Last month, the MEJ introduced you to a compendium of research on small business finance released by the SBA Office of Advocacy and entitled, appropriately enough, Small Business in Focus: Finance. The first report was, you may recall, a general overview of the small business lending market according to loan amounts and lending institutions. That [...]

I guess I don’t even need to tell you this but I don’t see any of that when I look at these numbers.

What I see instead are a lot of federal and state lawmakers — you know, the ones who constantly prate on and on about how small businesses are the engine of our economy — who are failing miserably and don’t appear to know it.

Half of the nation’s sole proprietorships earned less than $10,000 in receipts in 2005. That is a statistic that should make everybody at the Small Business Administration and every other small business support agency hang their heads in deep shame.

At approximately the same time that the Census Bureau was releasing the 2007 nonemployer data, another important bit of research into nonemployer businesses was also released — this time, by The Enterprise Center at Salem State College. The study, entitled “Proprietor Employment Trends in Massachusetts and Essex County: 2001- 2006,” was commissioned by The Enterprise [...]

A little over a month ago, the House Small Business Committee held a hearing to discuss Congressional efforts at health care reform, in search of bipartisan consensus on broad principles for said reform. Last week, the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship took its turn to host a roundtable to discuss small businesses and [...]