A little over a month ago, the House Small Business Committee held a hearing to discuss Congressional efforts at health care reform, in search of bipartisan consensus on broad principles for said reform. Last week, the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship took its turn to host a roundtable to discuss small businesses and [...]

While most of the nation’s Congress watchers are lining up in anticipation of much high drama and political theater around the various incarnations of proposals for health care reform, there are other and much quieter chores being attended to on Capitol Hill. For example, both the House and Senate Small Business Committees have begun the [...]

The Credit Cardholders Bill of Rights Act (H.R. 627) passed the House more or less painlessly, after the consideration of a scant sixteen amendments or so, at the end of last month. Now, it’s the Senate’s turn. That body is currently considering the Credit CARD Act (S.414), which was offered by Senate Banking Committee Chairman [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

Maybe those big companies just need to be allowed to die.

A lot of people in Washington seem to find that a terrifying prospect. More terrifying, evidently, than being trillions of dollars in debt.

It didn’t have to be this way, if the policy makers had been willing to put their money where their months have been for years.

Whatever changes President Obama might want to bring to the tone or the modus operandi in Washington, at least one thing that remains the same: this is the time of year for budget hearings. And the budget hearing held before the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship last week was, in many ways, simultaneously [...]

It is always interesting to see how much time and energy (not to mention money) members of Congress will expend on a tiny minority of firms, large or small. At a time when capital markets remain more or less frozen and it is probably worth looking at every source of capital that may be available [...]

Last week, the Contracting and Technology Subcommittee of the House Small Business Committee held a hearing to look into what needs to be done to ensure that small firms get their fair share of contracting awards to be made under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The issue is fairly important. Since there is relatively [...]

The House Small Business Committee has been chugging along at its usual brisk clip, with current Chair Nydia Velázquez working the Obama Administration’s agenda as faithfully as former Chair Don Manzullo did for the Bush Administration. So, after forays into the small business angle on the state of the economy, health care reform and even, [...]