Last week, President Obama sent his eagerly awaited budget proposal for fiscal 2012 to lawmakers on Capitol Hill. As you have probably been hearing since last week, the budget includes some cuts, a few increases, and a few revenue raisers. The resulting proposal is a $3.73 trillion budget that includes $1.1 trillion in budget deficit [...]

As much of a nightmare as this recession has been for the entire global economy, and as scary as it was to watch the entire capital market system upon which capitalism rests teeter on the brink, there has been one ray of sunshine to emerge from the shambles. Some of the more obscure microbusiness service [...]

The federal budget process as it concerns the U.S. Small Business Administration has taken a slight turn for the unexpected this year. Normally, the relevant House and Senate Committees hold budget hearings to hear what the SBA Administrator has to say in defense of their agency’s budget proposal. That is followed by adoption of the [...]

Suddenly, lawmakers were taking a second look at Microloan.

Not that they haven’t always been willing to look at it. It is thanks to their consistent support that President George W. Bush was unable to get rid of it, even though he tried for three years or so.

But, now that President Obama has demonstrated that he is willing to seriously fund the program, and now that lawmakers have seen they way Microloan Intermediaries were able to pick up some of the slack when the major SBA 7(a) lenders had a collective hangover, some people are starting to talk about increasing the loan cap and expanding the program.

And I will confess to you that it bothers me.

As you may recall, the Tax and Finance Subcommittee of the House Small Business Committee reported out a package of several bills which, combined, would reauthorize and tweak the SBA’s small business access to capital programs. In the next step in that process, the full Committee heard witness testimony about what various segments of the [...]

What a difference an Administration makes (with apologies to Dinah Washington). It wasn’t so very long ago that the microenterprise development industry was hanging on like grim death, lobbying desperately to fend off the attempts of the Bush Administration to rid itself of the SBA Microloan program for good. The fortunes of microfinance in the [...]