Most of us don’t really need loans.

We need training and technical assistance.

While you’re at it, we could use a little regulatory relief.

Oh … and tax simplification would be nice, too.

In short, we need a bunch of things that are difficult to accomplish politically because they are not particularly urgent — unless you are a small business owner — and they are not particularly sexy, so they don’t make for riveting headlines.

Small business regulations could never hold a candle to a Congressman’s flexed biceps.

The folks over at the Small Business Administration have been talking about small businesses in underserved communities quite a bit lately. The idea, presumably, is to seek them out and offer helpful goodies so that the underserved won’t be anymore. Over the last few months, there have been several announcements on the subject. The SBA [...]

The Justice Department is in the early stages of crafting a new set of regulations on Web site accessibility standards, in order to bring the web into compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA). And why, after more than 20 years, is the Justice Department suddenly talking about a new set of [...]

Small business lending began stabilizing during the 2009-2010 period (although it didn’t seem like it to some small business owners and advocates), which is a euphemistic way of saying the rates of decline slowed over the period. That’s the big take-away from the latest annual release of the aptly named Small Business Lending in the [...]

President Obama has recently hit the road, talking up that nebulous and wonderful thing called innovation.

Of course, we’re not talking about just any innovation.

The President is certainly not touting the sort of garden variety innovation that lets a microbusiness owner figure out how to rearrange his business model so that he can make a profit doing something that scores of business gurus before him decided was unprofitable.

That stuff just doesn’t count.

Last week, the Labor Department released its quarterly Business Employment Dynamics data for the second quarter of last year. During that quarter, gross job gains from opening and expanding businesses totaled 6.9 million, while gross job losses from closing or contracting businesses totaled 6.2 million. For the quarter, we saw a net job gain of [...]

One of the constant sources of partisan bickering on Capitol Hill these days has to do with how small businesses are doing and what might be needed to help them do better. In fact, Democrats and Republicans fight over that point so much lately that you might think they actually cared. On the other hand, [...]

There’s some very good news for microbusinesses from Capitol Hill this week. The Senate has voted to repeal Section 9006 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In case you’re wondering what that might be, that is the section of the health care reform bill that would have required business tax filers to file [...]

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 [...]