Truth to tell, everybody set about health care reform in the wrong way. In a more just universe, small business owners would have had the earliest and most influential input as policy makers were making policy.

As a group, they were yelling for reform first and most consistently. A few years ago, those in the know were saying that health care reform was “essentially a small business issue.”

That was before the insurance industry lobbyists stepped in and started throwing their weight around.

Congress returns from its brief Veterans Day break this week and will leave town again next week for Thanksgiving. One of the things expected to happen during this particular flying visit to Capitol Hill between District Work Periods is a vote in the House on a fistful of small business related bills. Three of them [...]

The President is in Asia at the moment, doing unheard-of but very American things like holding town hall meetings in China and bringing his very own Obama-ness to the Pacific Rim. Of much more concern to us is the fact that, just before he left, he announced that he would be holding a forum on [...]

Now, it is entirely possible that another hearing before another committee would have produced the sorts of witnesses who would have gratified that particular questioner with answers that reinforced his pre-existing ideas.

If you watch enough of these hearings, you see it fairly frequently. The Committee Member will question their own witness or someone who they can tell from prepared testimony already agrees with them. They will phrase questions in such a way as to get the witness to make their favorite points for them. It is all for the sake of the record.

But we have to be glad that didn’t happen in this case, because nobody learns anything that way, do they?

Late last month, the House Small Business Committee held yet another oversight hearing involving the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), this time focusing on the investments called for in the bill into nationwide broadband deployment. Broadband deployment is particularly important for microbusinesses, which tend to be heavily reliant on a variety of Internet-based technologies [...]

All things considered, reaction to the news that the economy grew 3.5% during the third quarter of this year was greeted with relatively little fanfare. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the sudden spike in gross domestic product is the fact that it primarily reflects a sizable increase in personal consumption, which is explained, in [...]

In its way, it’s kind of funny that so many members of Congress have suddenly become indignant about the plight of small businesses in the health insurance marketplace when the small business owners themselves (as well as both Small Business Committees) have been jumping up and down and yelling about that very thing for decades. [...]

During the Maryland event where the President made his Big Announcement, he said, “This administration is going to stand behind small businesses. You are our highest priority because we are confident that when you are succeeding, America succeeds.”

Are you feeling all warm and fuzzy yet?

I hate to have to burst your bubble, Mr. President, but, so far as I can tell, we only have your word for it that we are your highest priority. By any measure, whether it is time and attention, money and investment, even your failure to redeem your campaign promise to raise the SBA Administrator to Cabinet-level status, we have no evidence that we are any sort of priority to your Administration.

As you may recall, the Tax and Finance Subcommittee of the House Small Business Committee reported out a package of several bills which, combined, would reauthorize and tweak the SBA’s small business access to capital programs. In the next step in that process, the full Committee heard witness testimony about what various segments of the [...]

Oversight hearings, which fell out of fashion during most of the Bush Administration, came roaring back when Democrats took over Congress in 2006. In fact, there were those who thought said Democrats would use said oversight hearings to exact their revenge against Republicans for nameless partisan crimes and misdemeanors. That didn’t happen, of course. Mr. [...]