He missed it.

Small business owners don’t have savings to invest in energy efficient technology, she told him. We generally plow our profits back into our businesses and hope that, in the end, we can sell them and retire on the proceeds.

Have you ever used the SBA? the Senator wanted to know.

In her reply — which was too involved to repeat here but the short version was ‘yes’ — Ms. Reinhard also tried to make her audience understand that debt is often not an option for a small business if they won’t realize the return on the investment for five or ten years.

Granted, this hearing was not about access to capital. So, it’s not exactly a crime that he chose not to follow up on that nugget of information.

And for all I know, maybe Senator Kerry did catch that and file it away in the back of his brain to explore later.

But it is a point worth repeating because, judging from the sorts of policy moves that often come from Washington, this is something about microbusinesses that they don’t ‘get.’

Among microbusinesses, a tax break or other incentive to encourage anything at all is not going to be of much use if what you want the business owner to do involves spending money they don’t have.

As a general matter, microbusinesses run such hand-to-mouth operations that the premise of tax credits making something “more affordable” — for such things as, say, health insurance — simply does not hold water.

Not to mention that ideas about what is “affordable” in Washington tend to be markedly different from ideas about what is “affordable” among the microbusiness owners I talk to.

There are a lot of ways in which microbusinesses do not operate the way larger businesses do.

Eventually, somebody is going to have to notice that and make up their minds that they need to understand us better.