When they start talking about what they are going to do to help small businesses get through this recession, the only thing that seems to occur to them is to think of sixty-seven different ways that small businesses can take out a loan.

In fact, from the microbusiness point of view, loans seem to be the government’s answer to everything. If the economy is great, take out a loan! If the economy sucks, take out a loan!

If a tornado drops your house on the Wicked Witch of the East, take out a loan!

Do you remember the Credit Cardholders Bill of Rights? That piece of legislation, co-authored by Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA), was supposed to ride herd on credit card issuers and their sometimes nightmarish practices, such as arbitrarily altering contract terms, retroactive billing and seemingly deliberate obfuscation of [...]

Whatever changes President Obama might want to bring to the tone or the modus operandi in Washington, at least one thing that remains the same: this is the time of year for budget hearings. And the budget hearing held before the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship last week was, in many ways, simultaneously [...]

It is always interesting to see how much time and energy (not to mention money) members of Congress will expend on a tiny minority of firms, large or small. At a time when capital markets remain more or less frozen and it is probably worth looking at every source of capital that may be available [...]

The problem is that we have a finely tuned economic infrastructure, including a separate small business infrastructure, but most of the businesses in the country do not fit anywhere in that infrastructure anymore.

Most U.S. businesses, being microbusinesses, don’t fit into the financing infrastructure or the labor infrastructure or the tax infrastructure … or anywhere else, really.

The weirdest thing about that is, as I said, that the folks best equipped to address that problem don’t seem to have noticed.

Considering the fact that the small business community has been waiting for a substantive policy nod from President Obama since Inauguration Day, it’s too bad that the AIG story broke when it did. For a week, AIG and its bonus payments were pretty much all the media wanted to talk about. And, because of that, [...]

In another episode of Great Reruns from Congresses Past, a new bill to create a simplified standard home office deduction was introduced in the House last week. This time, the bipartisan legislation, astonishingly entitled the “Home Office Deduction Simplification Act of 2009″ (H.R. 1509), was sponsored by John McHugh (R-NY) and Kurt Schrader (D-OR). As [...]

Another item from previous sessions of Congress that has returned for an encore is the Equity for Our Nation’s Self-Employed Act of 2009 (H.R. 1470), introduced by Congressmen Ron Kind (D-WI), Wally Herger (R-CA), Suzanne M. Kosmas (D-Fla.) and David G. Reichert (R-WA). The bill is another gem of bipartisan legislative simplicity, the bulk of [...]

Last week, the Contracting and Technology Subcommittee of the House Small Business Committee held a hearing to look into what needs to be done to ensure that small firms get their fair share of contracting awards to be made under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The issue is fairly important. Since there is relatively [...]

Policy does matter. It matters to you for more reasons than I can conveniently list here.

Policy comes from somewhere, though, and that matters, too. That’s why policy matters to me. It’s important for somebody to confront those in power (with their own words, if need be), to add context to events so that you fully appreciate their significance, to hold your elected representatives accountable.

Otherwise, we’re all sheep.