Current

    House Panel Looks for Inefficiencies at SBA

    Happy Monday, fellow travelers.

    One of the more interesting things that happens when the House and Senate are divided along partisan lines — you know, where one party holds the House and the other holds the Senate — is the way that you can have hearings on exactly the same topic in the two chambers that sound so very different.

Specials

Special: An Interview with Guy Kawasaki

Want to be enchanting? I mean, enchanting to everybody: significant other, your children, the postman, your colleagues or (especially) your clients? In ...

Special: An Interview with Phil Simon

It's been awhile, hasn't it? The Microbusiness News Briefs Podcast is back, and is relaunching after its half-year hiatus with a ...

Special: An Interview with Anita Campbell

Well, here's something completely different. I decided to take a break from complaining about politicians for this final podcast of the ...

Podcasts

House Committee Takes On Tax Complexity

It’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these, hasn’t it?
So, Washington has been rather thin of microbusiness news lately, primarily because everybody has been focused on other things.
The new Republican House majority has been focused on passing a bunch of symbolic legislation that (they are perfectly well aware) doesn’t have a prayer of being [...]

Study: Small Biz Tax Gap Inaccurate, Unfair

Sometimes, when I write up the week’s microbusiness news, I get a little hot under the collar.
That happened this week. It usually shows up in my Policy Matters column but I was able to stay calm this week. That might be because I had so much to get irritated about.
There was the research report on [...]

Health Care Hearing Forgets Small Business

This has been one of those weeks during which I felt like tearing out my hair in frustration. I don’t understand how our nation’s leaders can manage to so completely ignore the world’s second largest economy — that is, us.

Then again, I just don’t understand their thinking. They spend a lot of time, neurons and money protecting the Big Boys from the things that might hurt them, like regulations and competition from us.