So, it’s not really the bailout money that is causing so many of them to have developed flaming hair issues.

The real problem is this concept of “too big to fail.” Few of us are Harvard economists but, as far as many of us are concerned, the phrase is arrant nonsense. There is no such thing.

Whatever the details of time and place, businesses fail because they are managed poorly. Objectively speaking, it does not make sense to invest in poorly managed companies that are poised to fail. Just ask Warren Buffet.

We are now roughly thirteen weeks into the presidency of Barack Obama and already the President has a fairly huge looming problem - that is, President Obama’s incipient small business problem. Once again, a new president was elected amid very high expectations by small business owners of real concern about our issues and, once again, [...]

How much do downturns really matter to small businesses? During the 2001-2003 recession, the number of microbusinesses increased by an impressive 8.7%, climbing from 21.1 million to 22.9 million. The number of employer firms increased by 3% over the period and employment at those firms grew by 2.5% during the recession years. According to these [...]

There were a total of eight administrative tasks required of the Small Business Administration by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), that were supposed to help small businesses regain access to capital, as well as some specific deadlines for the agency to have relevant regulations in place. And the statute mandates that the Government [...]

My friend wondered how it was possible to ignore more than 90% of the small business population and still claim to represent “the small-business community at large.”

I thought that was an excellent question. In fact, I thought that was such an excellent question that I simply had to tell you about it.

Sadly, however, I find myself completely unable to answer it.

Barack Obama may have sailed into the White House on a rousing chorus of The Times They Are A-Changin’, but one thing that hasn’t changed a bit is that the tax gap is a headache for microbusinesses that is not going away. In fact, President Obama has been in office for less than 100 days [...]

Congressional Democrats want to do something about the way wages have not kept pace with productivity increases over the last ten years or so, as part of their larger effort to “rebuild the middle class.” Evidently having concluded that the best answer to wage stagnation is labor unions, they have re-introduced the Employee Free Choice [...]

Maybe those big companies just need to be allowed to die.

A lot of people in Washington seem to find that a terrifying prospect. More terrifying, evidently, than being trillions of dollars in debt.

It didn’t have to be this way, if the policy makers had been willing to put their money where their months have been for years.

Last week, the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship held its long-awaited confirmation hearing for Karen Gordon Mills. Within six hours after the hearing was over, the Committee had unanimously approved the nomination. Late in the evening of the next day, the nomination was brought before the full Senate where, without a single chirp [...]

There have been several attempts in recent years to update, streamline, improve, modernize or otherwise tweak the Small Business Administration’s entrepreneurial development programs, almost all of which have failed. The main reason for that, I suspect, is that the reforms were attached to SBA re-authorization bills. So, this time around, various members of the House [...]