Back in June, President Obama nominated Dr. Winslow Sargeant to the position of Chief Counsel of the SBA Office of Advocacy. As the MEJ reported at the time, this was also something of a mystery appointment. Traditionally, Advocacy’s Chief Counsel has been appointed from the ranks of the legal profession, which makes sense in the [...]

Whatever your party affiliation, I would like to think that most Americans were proud to witness a true Moment in U.S. history, when our first African-American president was sworn into office.

I don’t know about you but I never for an instant thought that would happen during my lifetime.

There are those who would say that it all went downhill from there. Some of them have problems with our new President on basics of political philosophy, while others were simply disappointed when they discovered that Mr. Obama really couldn’t part the Potomac with a wave of his hand.

From a practical point of view, I have grown increasingly encouraged as the year has progressed.

States with growing economies present better opportunities for high-achieving college graduates, whether they wind up in wage and salary employment or self-employed, according to a working paper released by the SBA Office of Advocacy last week. The paper, entitled Educational Attainment, “Brain Drain,” and Self-employment: Examining the Interstate Mobility of Baccalaureate Graduates, 1993-2003, uses the [...]

Last week, the House of Representatives passed the Data Accountability and Trust At of 2009 (H.R. 2221). Possibly you will remember this train wreck of a bill from previous coverage. To refresh your memory, this piece of legislation does two things. First, it requires businesses that own sensitive consumer data to plan to secure that [...]

Small business managers nationwide are going to suddenly have to learn how to run microbusinesses. Some of them won’t; they’ll work hard to grow their firms back to non-micro small business size.

But some will discover that they like running micro lean outfits.

All of which reduces this: now that we are at the point at which we can no longer ignore the existence of microbusinesses, we will soon reach the point at which we can no longer ignore their public policy needs, either.

Payroll employment declined by 11,000 in November and the unemployment rate edged down slightly, to 10.0%. It’s a sign of the times that the news was greeted with a certain amount of relief and cautious optimism in certain quarters in Washington. But while the politicians are sniping among themselves about whether or not the decline [...]

The recent financial markets crisis turned out to be an unexpected boon for microfinance in the United States, for the simple reason that microenterprise development organizations (MDOs) were still lending while banks were still lacking liquidity or hampered by nervous regulators. However, while the added attention to microlending has been a very good thing for [...]

Here’s an almost unheard-of concept: if a government program isn’t working, how about turning it off and returning the unused portion of its budget to the Department of the Treasury? It’s the kind of thing that might fall under the category of “careful stewardship of taxpayer dollars” and it almost never happens. But that is [...]