Small businesses will need to sell to the federal government because the federal government buys more of everything than everybody. In order to expand their capacity to sell to the federal government, small businesses need to borrow money.

Then they’ll create a mess of jobs, which will get all those unemployed people off our backs. And you wonder why we love small businesses!

But will they? The prediction that this will be another jobless recovery is still with us and, if that’s the case, then policy makers seem to be barking up a whole forest full of the wrong tree.

Here in the U.S., we measure incomes rather than outcomes, as Umair Haque as pointed out on more than one occasion.

We measure how much money businesses make but we don’t measure how their products impact the lives of their customers.

We measure how much money households make but we don’t measure how well they live.

That is precisely why very few economists or policy makers are especially interested in microbusinesses: they are long on outcome but short on income.

I know I’ve said this before — although not since the word has become the political slogan of the White House — but the more things change the more they stay the same. Last week, the House Small Business Committee held a hearing to examine the perpetual problems small business owners have with the thorny [...]

It seems these days that Congress, having been sworn in last week, has a bet with itself to see how much can be accomplished before January 20th. Over in the Senate, for example, the scramble is on to hold as many confirmation hearings as possible. That’s only practical. Once he becomes unhyphenated President Barack Obama, [...]

It’s a well-established fact that the number of nonemployer businesses increases when the economy tanks. We won’t have the numbers for a couple of years yet but, when we look back on 2008, I have no doubt at all that we’ll see another large spike in self-employment.

And yet, there’s little evidence that the policy movers and shakes either know or care about all those single-person businesses, even as they consider how best to respond to this newly-declared recession.

That’s a problem.

The results of the U.S. presidential election would seem to be old news by now — not that the passage of a mere six days have stopped journalists and columnists from writing about him, his historic election, and what John McCain did wrong, ad nauseum. So, while many pundits are still hyperventilating over the shock [...]

If anything, technology has made it seem more possible for one person — a nonemployer business — to make a lot more money than they really need. But, making it more possible does not necessarily make it any more desirable.

All of which explains why nonemployer businesses remain in the dog house as far as almost everybody in the small business sphere is concerned.

Nobody said those tax breaks don’t help any of the businesses designated as ‘small’ by SBA guidelines, Mr. Chabot. Nobody said the tax breaks were bad, per se. In fact, they are probably a wonderful thing for those firms that make the kind of large investments that generate worthwhile returns from said tax breaks.

But, while they are a great thing for less than 10% of small businesses — including a few of your small business constituents, no doubt — it is important for you to note that the other 90% of small businesses get little to no benefit from them.

Again and again, lawmakers and federal agencies have chosen to protect competition between large firms, often at the expense of competition from small ones.

I wonder if you find that as peculiar as I do?

Isn’t it odd that giant Verizon is happier about competing for high speed Internet access customers against giant Time Warner Cable than it is about competing with little XO Communications?

The most conspicuous effort at serving so-called “underserved” markets on the part of the SBA to date has been the Microloan program. But while the Administration has not abandoned its efforts to find a way to reduce Microloan program costs, SBA Administrator Steve Preston is also plugging a pilot program called Emerging 200. The idea [...]