I must humbly apologize for being MIA last week; if you’re interested, you can get a good idea about why that happened by reading this.

But enough about that.

It’s interesting how exercised members of Congress get about small businesses and access to capital — and, specifically, those members who have a seat on either the Senate or House Small Business Committee — without spending any time talking about credit cards, credit card issuers and the impact of some of the more unsavory industry practices on said small business owners.

It wouldn’t be too terribly outrageous for one or the other of those panels to hold their own hearing to talk about credit cards and microbusinesses; I wonder why they haven’t?

If you’ve been with me for any length of time, then you know that I regularly sign the praises of the SBA’s business management training resource partners — the SBDCs, the WBCs and the SCORE volunteers. But honestly compels me to admit that they are not perfect.

That fact was really brought home for me during a hearing last week, when a witness testifying on behalf of the Association of Women’s Business Centers managed, in a single sentence, to indicate that the 49% of U.S. firms that are homebased, and the 77% of U.S. firms that are nonemployers and the 89% of microbusinesses that can’t get traditional debt financing, are somehow not “real” businesses.

This is not the kind of stuff that members of Congress need to be hearing from so-called expert witnesses. We don’t need anybody encouraging them to persist in their mistaken belief that microbusinesses are not important.

For more information:

Credit Cardholders’ Bill of Rights Act of 2008 (H.R. 5244) (THOMAS)
Association of Small Business Development Centers
Association of Women’s Business Centers
Service Corp of Retired Executives (SCORE)
Kauffman Foundation Firm Survey

Technorati Tags: financing, credit cards, business management training, entrepreneurial development, entrepreneurship, research, small business, microbusiness

 

 Panel Reviews Credit Card Consumer Protections [7:37m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download