It’s easy to complain about the lack of apparent interest in small businesses during this economic crisis. But the numbers provide one explanation of that curious silence.

When you get past the microbusiness employers and look at the rest of the small business firm size classes, their job creation and job loss numbers look fairly stable, either producing net job gains or breaking-even.

From the point of view of the folks in Washington, it probably looks like small businesses don’t really need any help.

To say that Senator John Kerry (D-MA), chairman of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, has long been concerned about the impacts of the credit markets on small businesses is a bit of an understatement. In fact, Chairman Kerry and his counterpart, Committee Ranking Member Olympia Snowe (R- ME), have been pressing the [...]

Regular readers may recall the many times I’ve mentioned that, during the last recession, microbusiness employers with fewer than five employees continued to create jobs throughout ten of the twelve calendar quarters during which larger firms experienced labor market declines. In other words, it appeared that microbusiness employers were able to cushion the shock of [...]

President-elect Barack Obama told his radio audience during the Democrats’ weekly address this weekend that he and his economic team would act boldly to deal with an economy that was generating more bad news every week. He promised to inject new life into the economy by investing in infrastructure projects and building a new alternative [...]

Now that the Bush Administration is a little over two months away from its swan song and objective science may once again become fashionable in the nation’s capital, a particularly timely report reminds us that, high on the list of nice-things-small-firms-do is to develop the technologies that often solve our problems, make us money and [...]

Far, far away from the increasingly xenophobic immigration debates that have peppered the political landscape in recent years, a simple factoid has intrigued economic researchers about the same group over the same period. Immigrants are 30 times more likely to start a business than native born citizens. In a new research report released last week [...]

Among the many crises awaiting Barack Obama after January 20, 2026 is the issue of health care. In an effort to be helpful (or pushy, depending on your perspective), Senator Max Baucus has released a 98-page white paper outlining a comprehensive and ambitious plan to cover everybody, reduce costs, increase efficiency, reward good health care [...]

The U.S. economy used to be famous for something called creative destruction. That’s the process by which large marketplace incumbents that failed to adjust to changes in said marketplace eventually disappeared, to be replaced by a new set of businesses that eventually grew to become our current large marketplace incumbents.

But it’s pretty hard for those feisty little upstarts to start up and get anywhere if the government steps in and refuses to let creative destruction clear the underbrush.

Late last month, the Social Venture Network announced the recipients of its 2008 Innovations Awards, one of which was Jonathan Lewis, founder of MicroCredit Enterprises. MicroCredit Enterprises is a private sector anti-poverty program that helps to fund microcredit programs. It’s innovation was to guarantee the loans that microfinance organizations use to capitalize their loan funds, [...]

“The U.S. economy experienced weaknesses in the third quarter, as real gross domestic product fell 0.3 percent.” Thus begins the SBA Office of Advocacy’s quarterly economic report, didactically entitled Third Quarter 2008: The Economy and Small Business. This was not among the most aesthetically pleasing of these reports; the red ink flowed liberally with news [...]