One of the most interesting things I’ve been watching over the last couple of weeks — and it was particularly striking last week in the days leading up to and away from the State of the Union address — is the rather odd rhetorical position occupied by America’s Small Businesses.

Politicians like to talk about us. That’s because people like us. It’s also because there was a time when politicians used to simply talk about business. That didn’t go over too well, because they made no secret about the fact that when they said “business” they meant “big business.”

These days, when they talk about small business, they still mean “big business” much of the time but they have grown too savvy to let people know that.

It’s not just a bunch of new and fanatical Congressional freshmen taking their oversight duties very seriously in their determination to squeeze every taxpayer dollar until it screams for mercy. Suddenly, it has suddenly become fashionable to root out waste, fraud and abuse on Capitol Hill. In fact, even some of those Senate Democrats have [...]

Last week, the SBA Office of Advocacy released its annual report to the President on the State of Small Business for the year 2009. It must have been quite the chore for a year that many people would very much prefer to forget, which may account for the surprisingly political tone of the document. The [...]

There is very little doubt that the speech delivered by President Obama to a joint session of Congress last week was not the same one he would have delivered if last November had turned out differently. Probably operating under the philosophy that politics is the art of the possible, he sought to strike themes that [...]

In all this, there has been a lot of the standard rhetoric about how wonderful small businesses are and how we are going to pull the country’s collective economic chestnuts out of the fire.

Except, of course, that nobody who either says or even thinks those things is talking about us — about microbusinesses.

That’s because policy makers and academic economists tend to think that microbusinesses are useless unless they’re doing a certain set of things in a certain way.

Of course, some people might consider it to be impolite to point out that the certain set of things and the certain way in question belong in a previous century. Since I generally try to be polite, I’m not going to point any of that out.

Last month, Federal Trade Commission (FTC) staff issued a preliminary report designed to provide a framework within which policy makers, industry and consumer advocates can craft standard practices to protect consumer privacy in the face of rapidly evolving data handling and consumer outreach technology. That report, entitled Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid [...]

Sometimes, when Democrats and Republicans decide to compete for the fictional title of “Best Friend To Small Business,” it can be fun to watch. The 112th Congress is beginning to take shape as the Regulatory Reform Congress — always assuming that the clearly expressed intentions from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, as well [...]

The House Small Business Committee has a new Chair in Representative Sam Graves (R-MO), a move on the part of the House Republican Conference that is not the least surprising since Graves was Ranking Member of that Committee during the last Congress. Graves is not one of the flashier members of Congress — think of [...]

Earlier this month, National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olsen released her Annual Report to Congress for FY 2010 and she has once again named tax code complexity as the most serious problem impacting taxpayers. The time for tax reform, according to the report, is right now. That is certainly something everybody in the small business community [...]

The reasonably obscure Trademark Technical and Conforming Amendment Act of 2010 (PL 111-146) went into effect last March with absolutely no fanfare whatsoever. But there is a provision in this law that could have a fairly profound effect on a very specific set of microbusiness intellectual property holders. That provision directs the Secretary of Commerce [...]