Last week, the Senate Committee on Finance held a hearing to mark the first anniversary of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, featuring Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. There was quite a lot about the hearing that was completely predictable. Committee Democrats spent their time encouraging Secretary Sebelius to elaborate on the [...]

If you look carefully at President Obama’s most strenuous efforts at small business outreach, you might start to see a pattern emerge. Take a look at “Startup America,” the administration’s effort to encourage and support what it calls “high impact” small businesses. The SBA has already lined up a mentor matching program for those entrepreneurs [...]

If you’ve been wondering what the House Small Business Committee has been up to lately, one of their main orders of business has been President’s proposed fiscal 2012 budget for the Small Business Administration. The Committee held its budget hearing last week and, according to opening statements prepared by both Committee Chairman Sam Graves (R-MO) [...]

When lawmakers bleat about how much they love small businesses, it can sometimes be nauseating but it is still a little reassuring. It is a nod in our direction, even if they don’t mean a word of it.

On the other hand, I’ll admit that it’s difficult to listen to those same lawmakers behave like starstuck fangirls every time somebody like Bill Gates or Jeff Immelt visits Capital Hill. Clearly, they really believe that U.S. economic policy should revolve around big businesses.

I hesitate to say this because I know what kind of firestorm usually erupts whenever anybody evokes the “C” word.

Honesty compels me to admit, however, that we haven’t had economic policy revolving around small businesses since the days when there was a White House Conference on Small Business and when the SBA Administrator was elevated to a Cabinet level position.