Too many people on Capitol Hill persist in believing that it makes sense for microbusinesses to do business the way IBM does business, relying on strategies that are complex and paperwork intensive.

But why would we want to do business in ways at which IBM excels and at which we rather spectacularly don’t?

This new recession is a really deep one, resulting in unprecedented numbers of long-term unemployed putting an unprecedented strain on that system of social safety nets I was talking about last week.

“We have a work-based safety net without any work,” said Timothy M. Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the article.

Nobody knows how long it’ll be before the jobs return but it’s pretty clear that what we’re doing right now — lurching along with these costly, last-minute extensions of unemployment insurance — is unsustainable.

I guess I don’t even need to tell you this but I don’t see any of that when I look at these numbers.

What I see instead are a lot of federal and state lawmakers — you know, the ones who constantly prate on and on about how small businesses are the engine of our economy — who are failing miserably and don’t appear to know it.

Half of the nation’s sole proprietorships earned less than $10,000 in receipts in 2005. That is a statistic that should make everybody at the Small Business Administration and every other small business support agency hang their heads in deep shame.

At approximately the same time that the Census Bureau was releasing the 2007 nonemployer data, another important bit of research into nonemployer businesses was also released — this time, by The Enterprise Center at Salem State College. The study, entitled “Proprietor Employment Trends in Massachusetts and Essex County: 2001- 2006,” was commissioned by The Enterprise [...]

Congressional Democrats want to do something about the way wages have not kept pace with productivity increases over the last ten years or so, as part of their larger effort to “rebuild the middle class.” Evidently having concluded that the best answer to wage stagnation is labor unions, they have re-introduced the Employee Free Choice [...]

If the last ten years have taught us anything, it is that both money and wealth will gravitate to themselves in much the same way that water molecules are attracted to each other.

What that means, if you’re talking about water, is that wet sponges soak up more liquid than dry sponges. If you’re talking about money and wealth, it means that full purses soak the economy more thoroughly than empty ones.

That is why the pre-occupation of the White House and Congress with economic growth, and their apparent belief that markets are sacrosanct, might best be described as misguided.

Dr. Chad Moutray, chief economist for the SBA Office of Advocacy, has been a busy guy lately. His recent working paper on the probable challenges and opportunities facing small businesses in the wake of the upcoming elections garnered quite a lot of attention — understandable, given how much attention has been focused on the election [...]

It’s looking pretty grim out there. A lot of microbusiness owners, watchers and advocates (myself included) were anticipating that microbusiness owners could cheerfully weather any credit crunch dealt by Wall Street, in light of the fact that microbusiness owners generally get by without access to credit under the best of circumstances. But as consumers pull [...]