This is a story that started with a House Small Business Committee hearing a couple of months ago. Members were interested in learning more about online small businesses but they didn’t learn much because they directed their questions to executives from Google and Amazon.com — who might know some things about what online microbusinesses do [...]

Those of us who arrived online in the mid to late 1990s with the first major wave of Internet-based microbusinesses sometimes forget that there will always be newbies. And, for as long as there are newbies, there will be scammers. Earlier this month, the Federal Trade Commission announced that it had secured a contempt order [...]

Large organizations, large companies, large numbers of people. Generally speaking, lawmakers tend to seek information on the issues from outfits that often have little in common with each other except their size: BIG. They do that because these sorts of outfits speak for or deal with large numbers of people. Volume. That’s what they care [...]

A thoroughly alarmed set of top lawmakers on the Senate Small Business Committee heard testimony last week about the home heating oil market, the small businesses that operate there, and the looming winter crisis spawned by outrageous oil prices. In New England, where most homeowners still use oil furnaces to heat their homes, production is [...]

The more time I spend talking to people about microbusinesses and their various incarnations, the more I am becoming convinced that policy makers really have no idea what’s going on out here. In a lot of ways, that’s not really their fault. I’ve said on more than one occasion that it’s difficult to keep your [...]

Do you remember when there were no cell phones? Back then, people went about their daily business without any thought of the phone calls they might be missing or the people they could be talking to if they had the technology to reach out and touch while walking the dog. Back then, people rode buses [...]

Representative John McHugh, Republican of New York, introduced legislation last week that would create a standard deduction for business use of the home. His deduction would be $1,500 and would be indexed to inflation. This might be much more exciting news if it weren’t for the fact that there are already two other bills with [...]

A hearing last week before the Subcommittee on Rural and Urban Entrepreneurship of the House Small Business Committee on cutting edge energy technologies that are currently in the pipeline offered a unexpectedly fascinating glimpse into where our energy future may be heading. The need for a next generation has become crystal clear as rising input [...]

During the period between June 2006 and June 2007, the number of small business loans increased by a robust 15%, according to the SBA Office of Advocacy’s annual survey of small business lending in the United States, unsurprisingly entitled Small Business and Micro Business Lending in the United States for Data Years 2006-2007, which was [...]

During the recent Memorial Day congressional recess, Senator John Kerry (D-MA) — wearing his Senate Small Business Committee Chairman hat— held a field hearing in Pittsfield, MA, to explore some of the challenges and opportunities for small businesses facing the current energy crisis. What he learned there was that the problem of rising energy costs [...]