Last week, the House Small Business Committee held a hearing called “The Role of Small Businesses in Stimulating the Economy.” In spite of that clearly descriptive title, however, it would be difficult for me to tell you in a single sentence what exactly the topic of the hearing was. Topics covered included the housing market, [...]

There are some basic, fundamental differences between Republicans and Democrats but a desire to toot their own horn is not one of them. In recognition of National Small Business Week, which took place last week, the Senate Democratic Policy Committee released something that might loosely be called a report on all they have accomplished so [...]

Given what has been happening to the price of crude lately, the SBA Office of Advocacy released particularly timely new research last week that analyzes the potential impacts of energy price fluctuations on small firms and examines the degree to which small firms pay more for energy than do large firms. In this study, Bollman [...]

If you want to talk small business policy, one perpetual issue is small businesses and federal procurement. Unfortunately, federal procurement is a perpetual issue because procurement officers assume microbusinesses can’t fill a government contract and most microbusinesses don’t want to put themselves through the paperwork-intensive, complicated process of selling to the feds. But how is [...]

Women Impacting Public Policy (WIPP) released its sixth annual policy survey of women business owners last week, and the health of the economy took the honors as the number one issue of concern to survey respondents. That fact alone is worth a second look because it is the first time since WIPP has been conducting [...]

As advertised, last week the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship held a hearing to look into the impact of the credit crunch on small businesses. Setting aside the argument about whether, in fact, there is a small business credit crunch, it seems that SBA Administrator Steve Preston is concerned about ‘very small businesses’ [...]

In its latest member survey, released last week, the National Association for the Self-Employed decided to ask how the housing market meltdown is effecting microbusiness owners. More than eight in ten microbusiness owners also own their home and a sizable 59% of them have fixed rate mortgages. That does not mean, however, that nobody is [...]

The House Small Business Committee held a hearing last week, which was endowed by the Committee majority with the title “Modernizing the Tax Code: Updating the Internal Revenue Code to Help Small Businesses Stimulate the Economy.” Of course, both hearing witnesses and Committee Republicans used the occasion to lobby hard for making the 2001 and [...]

In another hearing last week, a House Small Business Committee subcommittee looked into the question of whether rising fuel costs are impacting small businesses. On its face, that may seem like a stupid question to you but it is not as straight-forward as it seems. Of course, the immediate answer is a loud and emphatic [...]

In 2005, almost half of employees at small firms who were married to an employee of a large firm are estimated to have been covered as dependents by their spouse’s health insurance benefits plan. This rather intuitive and commonsensical notion is one of the principal findings in a new research report released last week by [...]