You can’t tell from reading the news but members of Congress have other things to do besides fight about health care reform. They have to fight about global climate change and energy policy. They have to fight about re-writing the rules for the financial services industry. And, under the category of housekeeping, they have to [...]

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 [...]

If you happen to be enough of a political junkie to have been regularly consuming episodes of As the Wise Latina Turns — otherwise known as the confirmation hearings of Judge Sonia Sotomayor as Supreme Court Justice — no doubt you would find last week’s friendly and uneventful confirmation hearings for SBA Chief Council for [...]

Congress has been working with quiet but surprisingly diligent effort to pass the several pieces of legislation needed to (finally) reauthorize the U.S. Small Business Administration — preferably for longer than a few months. So far, bills to reauthorize and “improve” the SBA’s entrepreneurial development programs and its research grants programs have passed in the [...]

Speaking of re-authorization, last week, the House Small Business Committee continued down their own path to SBA re-authorization — having already dealt with the entrepreneurial development programs — with a look at the SBA’s access to capital programs. The Committee held a somewhat lengthy hearing with two panels of witnesses, one of which held representatives [...]

We are now roughly thirteen weeks into the presidency of Barack Obama and already the President has a fairly huge looming problem – that is, President Obama’s incipient small business problem. Once again, a new president was elected amid very high expectations by small business owners of real concern about our issues and, once again, [...]

There were a total of eight administrative tasks required of the Small Business Administration by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), that were supposed to help small businesses regain access to capital, as well as some specific deadlines for the agency to have relevant regulations in place. And the statute mandates that the Government [...]

Last week, the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship held its long-awaited confirmation hearing for Karen Gordon Mills. Within six hours after the hearing was over, the Committee had unanimously approved the nomination. Late in the evening of the next day, the nomination was brought before the full Senate where, without a single chirp [...]

There have been several attempts in recent years to update, streamline, improve, modernize or otherwise tweak the Small Business Administration’s entrepreneurial development programs, almost all of which have failed. The main reason for that, I suspect, is that the reforms were attached to SBA re-authorization bills. So, this time around, various members of the House [...]

The problem is that we have a finely tuned economic infrastructure, including a separate small business infrastructure, but most of the businesses in the country do not fit anywhere in that infrastructure anymore.

Most U.S. businesses, being microbusinesses, don’t fit into the financing infrastructure or the labor infrastructure or the tax infrastructure … or anywhere else, really.

The weirdest thing about that is, as I said, that the folks best equipped to address that problem don’t seem to have noticed.