The total number of U.S. firms grew by about 3.9% between 2004 and 2005, up from 25.4 million to 26.4 million, according to the latest firm size data released by the U.S. Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy last week. Nonemployers were up by 4.5% to 20.4 million. Microbusiness employers with fewer than five workers [...]

Last week, the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship announced that its Chairman, Senator John Kerry (D-MA), was preparing to introduce a small business proposal to be included in the Senate version of the economic stimulus package. Besides the standard tax incentives and loan fee reductions, the bill includes provisions that basically double funding [...]

The microenterprise development industry in the U.S. is quietly changing. In some ways, that was inevitable. It is modeled on third world experiments and needed to evolve to fit its environment. To get more specific, microenterprise development industry leaders are recognizing that it needs to stop isolating itself and take its place in the nation’s [...]

One of the highlights of January in Washington took place last week when IRS National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olsen issued her annual report to Congress for the 2007 tax year. Olsen is still grousing about the tax gap, although she is more focused on administrative adjustments the IRS could make to address the problem rather [...]

An article published recently by the Rural Sociological Society, of all places, suggests that policy makers may have been bucking the trends all these years where rural development is concerned. The article notes, for example, that self-employment among rural non-farm workers has increased by more than 240% since 1969, while wage and salary workers have [...]

Plans for high speed passage of an economic stimulus package to either stave off or mitigate the effects of a recession were plastered all over the media last week as a wave of economic bad news rattled forecasters and sent the Dow plummeting. Several ideas have been floated, reflecting partisan differences, and naturally nobody is [...]

The SBA budget has been a bone of contention between Congress and the White House for the entire eight years of the Bush presidency. After all, this has been a period during which the SBA attained the dubious distinction of having the highest percentage of its budget cut of any federal agency. The top two [...]

More than eighty federal regulations have been nominated for review by concerned small business owners and small business advocates as a part of the SBA Office of Advocacy’s Regulatory Review and Reform initiative, the agency announced last week. The initiative, nicknamed r3, is another plank of President Bush’s effort to reduce regulatory burdens for small [...]

Most patent and trademark holders may be microbusinesses and individuals but most microbusiness owners are not patent or trademark holders. That is the big take-away from a member survey released last week by the National Association for the Self-Employed. What’s really interesting is that 25% of microbusiness owners have looked into those intellectual property protections [...]

It has been almost seven long years but the SBA has finally published a set of proposed rules to implement the Women’s Procurement Program that has been a bone of contention for six of them. Unfortunately, the SBA studied the RAND Corporation’s research and came to the conclusion that there were only four relatively obscure [...]