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. [...]

When it comes to controversial, gigantic, game-changing legislation, Congress is not slacking off. When lawmakers are finished with the current health care reform slugfest, there is another major legislative initiative waiting in the wings for the to fight about next. And the probable subject of the next round of mud-slinging is the Clean Energy Jobs [...]

Last week, the Finance and Tax Subcommittee of the House Committee on Small Business completed mark-up of SBA capital access reauthorization legislation. That is a good start on the self-imposed October 31st deadline established by the most recent continuing resolution. In fact, the subcommittee passed a whopping eight bills up to the full committee following [...]

Congress has not yet finished with health care reform, of course, but that hasn’t stopped them from starting to fashion what will no doubt be the next huge policy debate: energy and the environment. Which makes a new report released last week by the National Small Business Association (NSBA) not just interesting and informative, but [...]

The President was going to give a major speech on health care reform to a joint session of Congress. This is something that doesn’t usually happen beyond the annual State of the Union Address. Said the White House Press Office, ‘Let there by hype.’ And there was hype. In the end, the Great Speech got [...]

If you stop to think about it, it’s rather astonishing to reflect that it was back in 1993 that newly sworn-in President William Jefferson Clinton vowed to fix health care and provide coverage for everybody in the country. The rest, as they say, is history. It is now sixteen years later and we have the [...]

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 [...]

Small business owners say the economy is doing worse than it was five years ago, although there was a slight increase in the number of small firms anticipating economic growth in the next twelve months, according to the results of a newly released survey by the National Small Business Association (NSBA). The 2009 Mid-Year Economic [...]

Last week, the SBA Office of Advocacy released a compendium of research on small businesses and access to capital, a topic very much in the forefront of small business policy makers over the last ten months. The research consists of four papers, released under the single and easy to understand title Small Business in Focus: [...]