In other words, microbusinesses are small and that’s why we don’t get what we need.

Except for those microbusinesses that are not small (in revenue, if not in head count). The high earners “prove” that success is possible with what’s already there, which is why we still don’t get what we need.

And, if we point out that those few high-earning microbusinesses are the exception that prove the rule, and that microbusinesses may be too low-revenue to care about but they are too numerous to ignore, we get vague promises that somebody will look into it.

Last week’s Labor Department report that the economy added 162,000 jobs last month has prompted a certain amount of political happy dancing, justified or not. Even accounting for the 42,000 temporary workers hired by the Census Bureau and the labor market action that can be considered as delayed from February, the news is still some [...]

Last week, the SBA Office of Advocacy released the latest in its series of Quarterly Indicators briefs, this time reporting on the fourth quarter of 2009. So, now, I get to throw a bunch of numbers at you, the good news being that there will not be a quiz when I’m done. The Commerce Department [...]

When the financial markets collapsed and small business lending froze, one set of heroes of the day was the nation’s microlenders. In response, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act included enough money to support $50 million in microloans, an unprecedented infusion of funding for the federal government. Unfortunately, microfinance organizations recently seem to be facing [...]

Nobody is doing the happy dance exactly but there are some rather more cheerful noises coming from hither and yon with respect to economic prospects in the near term. Economy watchers don’t expect a return to truly robust growth but, after what the U.S. economy endured during 2009, any sort of growth is welcome. So, [...]

Sixty-four percent of small business owners report decreased revenue over the last 12 months, according to a survey released last week by the National Small Business Association. On the other hand, a majority of survey respondents (52%) expect the economy to produce growth opportunities over the next 12 months. And here’s more good news: the [...]

We all know that it is not rational to expect the economy to go straight from ‘ew’ to awe in less than a month. And, while it might make sense to assume that things will be better in December 2010 than they were in January 2010, it will still take some time to get there.

So, while you are listening to various folks with various sorts of axes to grind, bear in mind that things are neither uniformly wonderful nor frighteningly terrible. It isn’t necessary to find deep meaning or predictive value in any particular set of tea-leaf substitutes.

Right now, it is what it is.

Part of the reason why they don’t know what to do is because the economy is not behaving the way it used to and nobody has appeared before them to explain how it is behaving now because nobody really knows.

Besides the incentives provided by campaign donations, lawmakers like to tinker with big companies at times like this because the big companies haven’t changed. They remain familiar and the lawmakers understand them.

The things they are doing for small businesses are only helping a small number of them because only a small number of them are still doing business in 20th century ways. They don’t know how we operate anymore and there aren’t enough of them who do their own tweeting for us to explain it to them.

It’s the start of a new year and everybody in the small business community seemed infused with a new sense of optimism. But that faith in economic good things to come took something of a hit when we learned that the economy lost another 68,000 jobs in December. Of course, some where less surprised by [...]

Over the whole of 2009, we have heard quite a lot about how members of Congress know that small businesses are “the engine of the economy” and “the key to economic recovery.” We have also watched while a lot of the legislative activity throughout the year did not seem to match the rhetoric. We can [...]