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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

Last week, I told you about new legislation introduced by Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship Chairwoman Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Committee Member Ben Cardin (D-MD) to improve the 8(a) program for “socially and economically disadvantaged” entrepreneurs — with a focus on federal procurement. Chairwoman Landrieu spent still more time on the issue of [...]

If you wanted to support a business in your community through a severe economic downturn, there are only two ways you could do that directly. You would have to either give the business owner money to invest in his business (equity capital) or you would have to buy things from that business. Most people are [...]

It seems pretty clear that the Obama Administration wants businesses to start hiring again and that they want that to happen really badly. The President has been doing a certain amount of campaigning to let citizens know what he’s been doing to deal with an unemployment rates that is stubbornly hovering at around 10%. It’s [...]