If small businesses can’t borrow money, they won’t be able to deal with cash flow issues or meet payroll or more forward with expansion plans (yes, Virginia, firm expansions do happen during recessions).

Without all that, they won’t be able to create jobs and lead us out of this recession.

The only problem with that prognosis is that small businesses are already leading us out of this recession. Nobody seems to have noticed because the businesses involved are very small and don’t move in the same circles as Vern Buchanan.

They are microbusinesses.

If you stop to think about it, it’s rather astonishing to reflect that it was back in 1993 that newly sworn-in President William Jefferson Clinton vowed to fix health care and provide coverage for everybody in the country. The rest, as they say, is history. It is now sixteen years later and we have the [...]

Congress has been working with quiet but surprisingly diligent effort to pass the several pieces of legislation needed to (finally) reauthorize the U.S. Small Business Administration — preferably for longer than a few months. So far, bills to reauthorize and “improve” the SBA’s entrepreneurial development programs and its research grants programs have passed in the [...]

Small business owners say the economy is doing worse than it was five years ago, although there was a slight increase in the number of small firms anticipating economic growth in the next twelve months, according to the results of a newly released survey by the National Small Business Association (NSBA). The 2009 Mid-Year Economic [...]

I guess I don’t even need to tell you this but I don’t see any of that when I look at these numbers.

What I see instead are a lot of federal and state lawmakers — you know, the ones who constantly prate on and on about how small businesses are the engine of our economy — who are failing miserably and don’t appear to know it.

Half of the nation’s sole proprietorships earned less than $10,000 in receipts in 2005. That is a statistic that should make everybody at the Small Business Administration and every other small business support agency hang their heads in deep shame.

At approximately the same time that the Census Bureau was releasing the 2007 nonemployer data, another important bit of research into nonemployer businesses was also released — this time, by The Enterprise Center at Salem State College. The study, entitled “Proprietor Employment Trends in Massachusetts and Essex County: 2001- 2006,” was commissioned by The Enterprise [...]

Last week, the SBA Office of Advocacy released a compendium of research on small businesses and access to capital, a topic very much in the forefront of small business policy makers over the last ten months. The research consists of four papers, released under the single and easy to understand title Small Business in Focus: [...]

A little over a month ago, the House Small Business Committee held a hearing to discuss Congressional efforts at health care reform, in search of bipartisan consensus on broad principles for said reform. Last week, the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship took its turn to host a roundtable to discuss small businesses and [...]