Every now and then, federal lawmakers are seized with budget cutting zeal, which inspires them to start hunting for wasteful spending in federal programs. That sort of thing is going on right now, in both the House and the Senate. Late last month, the House Committee on Small Business held a hearing on whether certain [...]

Last week, the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship held its own oversight hearing to examine fraud, waste, abuse and duplication at the Small Business Administration. Perhaps the largest difference between this hearing and that held before the House Small Business Committee a week earlier was that this hearing focused early on fraud. Because [...]

It’s always interesting when one or the other of the Congressional small business committees holds a hearing on an issue that is of critical importance to microbusinesses and manages to get through the entire proceeding without talking about microbusinesses at all. That is essentially what happened earlier this month when the House Committee on Small [...]

Sometimes, Congress winds up doing the right thing for the wrong reasons and that is never as true as it is when lawmakers don’t know what is going on out here in the real world. Last month, Congresswoman Nita Lowey (D-NY) introduced the Small Business Credit Card Act (H.R. 1137). This relatively short bill would [...]

If you look carefully at President Obama’s most strenuous efforts at small business outreach, you might start to see a pattern emerge. Take a look at “Startup America,” the administration’s effort to encourage and support what it calls “high impact” small businesses. The SBA has already lined up a mentor matching program for those entrepreneurs [...]

House Democrats are still fighting with the Republican majority over regulations and, specifically, over small businesses and regulations. That argument was very much on display during a hearing before a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee earlier this month, the subject of which was the Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act of 2011 (H.R. 527). The bill [...]

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 [...]