Given all the yelling about ‘jobs, jobs, jobs,’ the SBA Office of Advocacy released a particularly timely report last week, aptly entitled An Analysis of Small Business and Jobs. The paper, authored by Advocacy economist Brian Headd, bills itself as a primer to help policy makers (and anyone else who happens to be interested) “understand [...]

It looks like the SBA is finally going to implement that Women’s Federal Procurement Program that so many women’s groups were fighting about with the Bush Administration for eight long years. It all started back in 2000 when President Bill Clinton signed the Equity in Contracting for Women Act, which called for the SBA to [...]

One of the big surprises contained in the research released last month by the Microbusiness Research Institute (MRI) was the microbusiness take on taxes. For years, small business lobbying organizations stoutly asserted that the nation’s small business owners wanted lower tax rates. They do, too, but the MRI research found that more of them want [...]

Last night, I was a guest on Blog Talk Radio’s Coach for Innovation with Dee McCrory. The subject under discussion was microbusinesses and jobs and the future of the American workplace.

Dee and I talked for an hour. We could easily have talked for two. It’s a big subject.

I’ve been writing about that subject here and everywhere else I write for a long time. Lately, it’s been a regular topic.

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke attempted to make headlines last week on a visit to Ellicott Dredges in Baltimore, MD, to chat up President Obama’s National Export Initiative. In his State of the Union address in January, the President vowed to double U.S. exports within the next five years and, as with several other items intended [...]

This new recession is a really deep one, resulting in unprecedented numbers of long-term unemployed putting an unprecedented strain on that system of social safety nets I was talking about last week.

“We have a work-based safety net without any work,” said Timothy M. Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the article.

Nobody knows how long it’ll be before the jobs return but it’s pretty clear that what we’re doing right now — lurching along with these costly, last-minute extensions of unemployment insurance — is unsustainable.

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 [...]

After all the drama surrounding the down-to-the-wire Senate health care reform bill, which was finally passed on Christmas Eve, 2009, it’s a bit anticlimactic to have to report that President Obama is still having to urge Senate Democrats to ‘finish the job.’ There remain enough differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill [...]

Small entities — including small businesses, small and local governments and small non- profits — saved $7 billion in first-year costs and $745 million in annual recurring expenses, thanks to the SBA’s Office of Advocacy in its role as enforcer of the Regulatory Flexibility Act (Reg Flex). That’s the big take-away in the Obama Administration’s [...]

The Obama Administration seems to be playing its own rather peculiar game with the nation’s small businesses, one that might best be described as I give with one hand and take away with the other. So, while Administration officials have been singing the praises of small businesses and describing the Presidents pro-small business proposals, there [...]