It’s always interesting when one or the other of the Congressional small business committees holds a hearing on an issue that is of critical importance to microbusinesses and manages to get through the entire proceeding without talking about microbusinesses at all. That is essentially what happened earlier this month when the House Committee on Small Business convened a hearing on the crippling complexity of the tax code. Chairman Sam Graves (R-MO) began the hearing by pointing out, among other things, that most small business owners are sole proprietorships, LLCs, partnerships and S-corporations, all of which are pass-through entities whose owners pay taxes on their business incomes at individual rates. So, if Congress is going to look into tax simplification, both he and Ranking Member Nydia Velázquez noted in their separate opening statements, they need to do more than review and revise the corporate tax code.

In spite of the agreement across the aisle on the need for tax simplification, the Committee majority spent some time beating their own particular agenda drum. There were a few fairly irrelevant forays into the budget deficit and a few pokes and jabs at the Obama Administration on the economy, health care and overall growth in regulations. Fortunately, those pokes and jabs were relatively low key and Committee Democrats did not seem inclined to respond in kind — for the most part. Meanwhile, there was no discussion at all about microbusinesses that have no personnel to handle excess paperwork (never mind not having the money to hire tax professionals), owners who don’t have problems with things like selling their business or making millions of dollars in revenues and having to worry about the tax rates for the top income brackets. Given all of that, it looks as if it will be entirely possible for Congress to reform the tax code and address everyone’s problems except ours.