I’m sure you’ve heard to old saying: Be careful what you wish for.

Wiser words were never spoken.

Regular readers of The MicroEnterprise Journal (as well as The Journal Blog) will know that one of my recurring themes is microbusinesses and access to capital. And, when writing about that very interesting subject, I have often been known to lament the lack of support for the program that was a feature of the Bush Administration’s SBA.

The financial markets crisis that rocked everybody’s world, starting about a year ago, left matters in such a state that almost literally no one was lending except community banks, community development financial institutions (CDFIs) and microenterprise development organizations (MDOs).

Suddenly, small businesses that are not microbusinesses were finding out about the Microloan program. For any number of them, it literally saved their bacon and their business. Suddenly, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were writing about the program.

Suddenly, lawmakers were taking a second look at Microloan.

Not that they haven’t always been willing to look at it. It is thanks to their consistent support that President George W. Bush was unable to get rid of it, even though he tried for three years or so.

But, now that President Obama has demonstrated that he is willing to seriously fund the program, and now that lawmakers have seen they way Microloan Intermediaries were able to pick up some of the slack when the major SBA 7(a) lenders had a collective hangover, some people are starting to talk about increasing the loan cap and expanding the program.

And I will confess to you that it bothers me.

I don’t have a problem with expanding the program. I’ve been wanting that to happen for a long time.

By all means, I would say to them, do expand the program so that it is available to most microbusinesses rather than focusing almost exclusively on the poorest among them. Just, whatever else you do, don’t forget that microbusinesses were the program’s original target market.

We don’t get much in the way of policy goodies as it is. It would be a tragic fiasco if our only dedicated loan program turned out to be yet another casualty of the financial markets collapse of 2008.