It’s still early in the current legislative session and there’s something I’ve already noticed about both Small Business Committees.

At least once during each hearing so far, at least one Congressperson makes some sort of snide, sly dig about all those hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars being spent on big businesses.

It is turning out to be a bipartisan complaint, too, one of the few things Democrats and Republicans seem to have in common right now.

The sly digs from the lawmakers echo the much-less-subtle complaints from small business owners who congregate in person at Chamber meetings and online via twitter and LinkedIn.

The small business owners usually say, “Just think of what small business owners could have done with just a fraction of that money!” Or some variation on that theme.

Unspoken but very much acknowledged during these coded, cross-media, community conversations are several well-known facts.

The U.S. economy is in the midst of a severe recession. Since its inception, we’ve lost more than 4 million jobs. Because this economic upheaval appears to be more than the standard business cycle trough, it appears that the jobs that have been lost are not coming back.

To address this situation, policy makers need to support those economic actors that create jobs in the U.S. economy (small businesses). In addition, it is important that policy makers encourage innovative companies that will create new technologies (small businesses) and early adopters in the economy that will use the new technologies (small businesses).

And, underneath all of that, there is the one thing that many of us think but few will say:

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.

Meaning that, instead of just talking about small businesses being the engine of the economy, how about acting as if they truly believe it?