It’s not just a bunch of new and fanatical Congressional freshmen taking their oversight duties very seriously in their determination to squeeze every taxpayer dollar until it screams for mercy. Suddenly, it has suddenly become fashionable to root out waste, fraud and abuse on Capitol Hill. In fact, even some of those Senate Democrats have [...]

There is very little doubt that the speech delivered by President Obama to a joint session of Congress last week was not the same one he would have delivered if last November had turned out differently. Probably operating under the philosophy that politics is the art of the possible, he sought to strike themes that [...]

In all this, there has been a lot of the standard rhetoric about how wonderful small businesses are and how we are going to pull the country’s collective economic chestnuts out of the fire.

Except, of course, that nobody who either says or even thinks those things is talking about us — about microbusinesses.

That’s because policy makers and academic economists tend to think that microbusinesses are useless unless they’re doing a certain set of things in a certain way.

Of course, some people might consider it to be impolite to point out that the certain set of things and the certain way in question belong in a previous century. Since I generally try to be polite, I’m not going to point any of that out.

Sometimes, when Democrats and Republicans decide to compete for the fictional title of “Best Friend To Small Business,” it can be fun to watch. The 112th Congress is beginning to take shape as the Regulatory Reform Congress — always assuming that the clearly expressed intentions from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, as well [...]

The House Small Business Committee has a new Chair in Representative Sam Graves (R-MO), a move on the part of the House Republican Conference that is not the least surprising since Graves was Ranking Member of that Committee during the last Congress. Graves is not one of the flashier members of Congress — think of [...]

At a press conference held in Washington last week, Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship Chairwoman Mary Landrieu (D-LA) took the podium to talk about what Congressional Democrats have done for small businesses and to plug their latest efforts in the current jobs bill that is, they say, being held up by Senate Republicans. [...]

It’s kind of odd when you stop to consider it. We keep hearing about how Congressional budget hawks have been waking up and are starting to complain that Uncle Sam is going too far into debt. In fact, that sort of thing is what has supposedly caused Senate Republicans to dig in their heels and [...]

Those forms on Everything-You-Could-Possibly-Imagine.gov all say that somebody reads each and every submission but we have no way of knowing, really.

And even if they do, the odds of those emails being read by somebody who matters, somebody who is in a position to evaluate a new idea on the merits and maybe take it to the President and say, “Excuse me, sir, but here’s something that I don’t believe we’ve considered … ”

… those odds are very slim. Let’s face it: all the evidence suggests that they don’t really want to know what we think. We all know that, even though they would be much happier if we pretended we didn’t.

Meanwhile, everywhere else you look — whether it is at social safety nets or whether it is at a National Broadband Plan or whether it is at the push to increase U.S. exports — there appears to be no place in Obamaland for the sturdy American microbusiness.

In many ways, that really doesn’t matter.

Microbusinesses have managed to grow in number and increasing importance in the U.S. economy without a shred of support from the federal government and I would imagine they will continue to do so.

On the other hand, I’ll confess I’m disappointed.

During his State of the Union address earlier this year, President Obama announced his goal to double U.S. exports within the next five years. It seems a laudable goal for a CEO-in-Chief. The economy has been pretty much in the tank since before Obama took office. The job market is only just starting to show [...]