This stuff matters to microbusinesses for two reasons.

For one thing, life is more expensive when you don’t have money. And the number of Americans who don’t have money is steadily increasing, which means that growing poverty is probably depressing entrepreneurship rates and, consequently, depressing economic growth.

The other issue is that infamous word “affordable.”

In case you ever wonder why well-paid politicians have ideas about what we “ought” to be able to afford that don’t match anybody else’s ideas on the subject, one major reason may be that they have no realistic idea of how much it costs to live — especially if their ideas are based on federal poverty guidelines.

It costs more to be poor. That sounds like a real contradiction but it is very real. For example, lower income households without relationships with financial services institutions pay premiums for simple services like cashing a pay check or paying a utility bill. Buying monthly commuter transit passes gets you a discount but, if you [...]

It’s looking pretty grim out there. A lot of microbusiness owners, watchers and advocates (myself included) were anticipating that microbusiness owners could cheerfully weather any credit crunch dealt by Wall Street, in light of the fact that microbusiness owners generally get by without access to credit under the best of circumstances. But as consumers pull [...]

According to a GAO report released last week, the SBA has any number of existing and looming structural problems. It faces impending personnel shortages as a large portion of its workforce will soon be eligible for retirement. Thanks to budget constraints, it has seemed urgent to streamline the agency’s operations so that it could, as [...]

I sometimes wonder why lawmakers don’t stop to ask themselves what people are doing when they start their nonemployer businesses.

Don’t they ever ask themselves what the owners of all those amazingly small businesses are trying to accomplish? Aren’t they even a little curious?

In many ways, nonemployer businesses don’t make economic sense. But starting them and running them is something that Americans are doing. In droves.

In spite of the fact that microbusinesses make up better than 9 out of 10 U.S. firms, surprisingly little is known about them. That’s because there has been relatively little research done on them. What little is known about microbusinesses almost exclusively concerns microbusiness employers. Neither economic researchers nor federal lawmakers pay much attention to [...]

Last week, the Small Business Administration, Office of Advocacy released a working paper with the highly descriptive title “Looking Ahead: Opportunities and Challenges for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Owners,” by Advocacy Chief Economist and Director of Research Chad Moutray. In the paper, Moutray identifies five challenges and five opportunities for small businesses that could be [...]

Microbusiness owners name the slowing economy by a wide margin as their top concern for 2009, according to a member survey released by the National Association for the Self-Employed last week. Now, there’s a shocker, huh? Coming in at a distant second place was the cost of health care, followed by tax fairness and complexity, [...]

Banks, for the most part, don’t want to make commercial loans to microbusinesses. They consider microbusinesses to be “too risky.”

Many of these same banks did not consider overpriced, securitized sub-prime mortgages to be quite so risky.

Certain government officials and certain bank managers do not want to engage in any form of microcredit. It has been shown that microcredit works when the financial institutions or non-profits involved provide technical assistance to the business borrowers. But that technical assistance costs money; the banks don’t want to make the investment because, they say, they can’t make money that way.

Many of those same banks thought they could make money from said overpriced, securitized sub-prime mortgages.

Lest anyone forget that there is a presidential campaign going on in the midst of the economic melodrama playing itself out on the Hill and on the Street, a new policy paper from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation serves as a timely reminder. The ITIF is a Washington-based tech policy think tank headed up [...]