Small business policy that is good for microbusinesses is hard.

During a Microbusiness Conversation last month, when the issue of sound public policy to help microbusinesses came up, here is how they described the essential policy challenge:

“What do you need? And can somebody afford to give that sort of help and can somebody pay for it?”

Those insightful words fell from the lips of Dr. Zolten Acs, chief economist for the SBA Office of Advocacy, and he’s right. This is the essential policy challenge for microbusinesses.

It’s harder to answer these questions than you might think.

Last week, the Census Bureau — which seems to have been very busy lately — released some preliminary estimates of business ownership numbers by gender and ethnicity, as well as by veteran status, from the 2007 Survey of Business Owners (SBO). The report, descriptively entitled Preliminary Estimates of Business Ownership by Gender, Ethnicity, Race and [...]

At a press conference held in Washington last week, Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship Chairwoman Mary Landrieu (D-LA) took the podium to talk about what Congressional Democrats have done for small businesses and to plug their latest efforts in the current jobs bill that is, they say, being held up by Senate Republicans. [...]

National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olsen has issued her annual report to Congress, in which she is required to describe for policy makers the taxpayers’ major challenges for that particular fiscal year. Olsen adds her voice to the growing chorus of dismayed observers who express concern about the newly increased reporting requirements contained in the Patient [...]

Last month, the SBA Office of Advocacy released a new research report entitled Bank Credit, Trade Credit or No Credit: Evidence from the Surveys of Small Business Finances, written by Rebel A. Cole with funding from Advocacy. Cole undertakes this research because there is almost nothing in the literature that examines small employer businesses that [...]

It’s kind of odd when you stop to consider it. We keep hearing about how Congressional budget hawks have been waking up and are starting to complain that Uncle Sam is going too far into debt. In fact, that sort of thing is what has supposedly caused Senate Republicans to dig in their heels and [...]

It has been more than a year now since President Obama nominated Dr. Winslow Sargeant to be Chief Counsel of the SBA Office of Advocacy. Back then, his nomination hearing before the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship was such a cordial affair that it’s difficult to believe there could be so much controversy [...]

The fact is that microbusiness owners who fail to worship at the Altar of Growth always seem to be subject to these kinds of value judgments by … well, by pretty much everybody.

My point here is that these are value judgments, no matter what anybody else says, and they are predicated on a certain set of assumptions.

They assume that all growth is good.

They assume that there is no such thing as “enough.”

They assume that anybody who doesn’t want to have a business in order to grow a business should not own a business. They should go find a job instead.

Last week might have been described as euphoric for me, because both the firm size class numbers for 2007 and the nonemployer numbers for 2008 were released. When does that ever happen?

And it is usually around this time that at least one person wonders what the big deal is. After all, they’re just numbers, right?

And that’s true. These releases are not contained on other people’s research reports, like most of the research I cover. They are raw data, nothing but numbers.

But these numbers, over time, show trends. Those trends matter, to both the microbusinesses they describe and the overall economy they inhabit.

Last week was a good one, if you’re a data wonk. In addition to the firm size class numbers for 2007, the U.S. Census Bureau also released new nonemployer numbers for 2008. The surprising news about 2008 for nonemployers is that their numbers fell for the first time since Census has been keeping track. Which [...]