One piece of good news is that, Max Baucus might favor mandatory insurance coverage for everybody but Mr. Obama does not — or at least, he didn’t when he was campaigning. We’ll get to see how strongly he feels about that when the rough and tumble of White House/Congressional relations begins to take shape after January.

(I guess that’s where we get to see Rahm Emanuel do his thing.)

The auto company bailout is alarmingly stupid, though, and makes me once again wish politicians could get it into their heads that they need to just let badly managed companies fail, no matter how big they are and no matter how many workers will lose their jobs. For one thing, they’re just delaying the inevitable. For another, they are wasting my money.

And, for a third, it’s a kind of knee-jerk thing for Obama to even be considering and I had a better opinion of his intellect than that.

The Microbusiness News Briefs is sponsored by GoToMyPC.

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www.GoToMyPC.com/podcast

For more information:

Call To Action: Health Care Reform 2009 (PDF)
SBA Office of Advocacy

I spent some time talking to Kirstie Darien, executive director of the legislative office for the National Association for the Self-Employed, for my lead article this week. It was a good chance to get her take on the election results, the upcoming lame duck session and the economic stimulus package they’re expected to produce, and the changed composition of the 111th Congress. That full interview will be available as a podcast special sometime within the next week.

And, speaking of interviews (and forgive me for throwing this in here but I wanted to let you know about it before any more time had passed), I hope you’ll give yourself the luxury of an hour to catch my interview with Jackie Rogers on Voice of America’s The Kitchen Table Entrepreneur radio show. I did the interview last Thursday afternoon but you can catch the archives whenever you like.

That’s one of the things that is so nifty about this technology, yes?

Getting back to the podcast, there’s also more on the economy, some disquieting observations about the anti-poverty efforts of social entrepreneurs and, as always, this week’s Policy Matters column.

The Microbusiness News Briefs is sponsored by GoToMyPC.

Access Your PC from Anywhere with GoToMyPC. Try it FREE for 30 days!
www.GoToMyPC.com/podcast

For more information:

Obama Administration Transition Web Site
National Association for the Self-Employed
SBA Office of Advocacy

But what I didn’t anticipate was what is now happening in the credit card market.

I will say that the MicroEnterprise Journal’s economic analyst, Anne Wenzel of Econosystems.com, warned me about this a couple of weeks ago. Once again, Anne surprises me with her acute forecasting skill; I feel very lucky to have her on board with the MEJ.

Another thing that economists are starting to worry about, which I didn’t mention during the podcast, is deflation. That is, decreasing consumer demand will depress prices and lower profits, causing still more layoffs that will further depress demand, further depressing prices. Rinse, lather, repeat.

It’s the kind of thing that could usher in a long period of joblessness but, again, I’m wondering how the sturdy nonemployer business will come into play here. If newly unemployed consumers look to starting a lot of nonemployer businesses to keep the wolf away from the door, the implications for the recession and the recovery may be profound.

One final note: make sure you go vote tomorrow. I can’t say that often enough and you don’t need me to tell you how important this election is. Please … vote.

The Microbusiness News Briefs is sponsored by GoToMyPC.

Access Your PC from Anywhere with GoToMyPC. Try it FREE for 30 days!
www.GoToMyPC.com/podcast

For further information:

Article: Consumers Feel The Next Crisis: It’s Credit Cards (NY Times)
Hearing Archive: Creating Opportunities for Small Businesses in an Economic Recovery (YouTube.com)
Report on Small Business Outlook (PDF)
SBA Office of Advocacy

For one thing, given the current state of the economy, the relevant issues are going to be that much more important in the coming months because the impacts are going to be felt that much more broadly.

Then, too, as I watch the microbusiness landscape with an eye on the big picture, I’m seeing that it’s as much of a mistake to lump all micro ventures into a single, huge ’smaller small business’ category as it is to lump microbusinesses in with larger small businesses.

At the same time, those part-time single person businesses that economists and other observers seem to want to dismiss are a critical component of the consumer economy in their own right. They represent a new kind of job creation, and they represent a strategy that a lot of middle class families are using to make ends meet. Without even getting into things like contributions to GDP and Treasury revenues, that makes them important all by itself.

What the various sorts of microbusinesses need in the way of support, going forward, is worth thinking about right now, one week out from the end of this interminable election … don’t you think?

For more information

American Human Development Project
Suite Franchon Enterprises
Small Business Administration: Opportunities Exist to Build on Leadership’s Efforts to Improve Agency Performance and Employee Morale (GAO report: PDF)
National Retail Federation
The Conference Board

The Microbusiness News Briefs is sponsored by GoToMyPC.

Access Your PC from Anywhere with GoToMyPC. Try it FREE for 30 days!
www.GoToMyPC.com/podcast

Now, I’ll admit it. I have opinions. I take sides. And, I’m told, it’s pretty clear how I’m inclined to vote based on the things that I write.

Among other things, my admiration for Mr. Sullivan can serve as a refutation of those who have sometimes accused me of partisan bias. Not that I’m saying I’m not biased, because I am.

I’m biased in favor of microbusinesses.

As for Tom, he is smart as well as shrewd, and perhaps one of the most outstandingly qualified individuals who has served in the Bush Administration. The only down side is that what he has been doing is relatively obscure and un-sexy, and far too few people pay attention to it.

Yet, his work has impacted the bottom line of millions upon millions of small business owners, who have been able to save billions of dollars in regulatory compliance costs over the last seven years through Advocacy’s … um … advocacy.

And the research funded and published by his office in that time has accomplished a very great deal for our overall understanding of small businesses, of microbusinesses, and of how both groups make critical contributions to the economy.

And you wonder why I’m a Tom Sullivan fan.

Best of all things to you, Tom. We’ll miss you.

The Microbusiness News Briefs is sponsored by GoToMyPC.

Access Your PC from Anywhere with GoToMyPC. Try it FREE for 30 days!
www.GoToMyPC.com/podcast

Access Your PC from Anywhere with GoToMyPC. Try it FREE for 30 days!
www.GoToMyPC.com/podcast

Apologies for last week. It’s a long story.

I’m particularly pleased with this week’s issue of the Microbusiness News Briefs. It deals, to a very large degree, with nonemployer firms.

There are any number of things you can say about nonemployers and I’ve probably said most of them. But here’s something I found out recently, thanks to a presentation by Kristen Lewis of the American Human Development Project.

I learned that, besides all the other things nonemployers do or could do, they help middle class families get a little less squeezed. Of course, we all knew that there’s quite a lot of income patching among nonemployer business owners but a lot of that income patching is taking place at the middle income level, now lower down the socio-economic totem pole.

Of course, we don’t have percentages or anything like that yet. It’ll take research and data and numbers to convince the economists and the policy makers. But … well, what do you think?

For more information:

American Human Development Project
SBA Office of Advocacy
National Association for the Self-Employed
Econosystems.com

Access Your PC from Anywhere with GoToMyPC. Try it FREE for 30 days!
www.GoToMyPC.com/podcast

I have to confess, I had a lot of fun writing this week’s newsletters. That is largely thanks to the conversations I had with Margaret Henningsen of Legacy Bank in Milwaukee and Gina Harman of ACCION USA, who offered some terrific input and insights for my analysis of the largely unnoticed silver lining in the small business access to capital story.

It’s kind of funny, though, that the economy is on everybody’s mind right now but the real issue has to do with credit. That will certainly impact the overall economy but they are not quite the same thing.

Also this week — just in case you’re tired of the subject — we’ve got a policy paper in which the prolific Information Technology and Innovation Foundation makes tech policy recommendations to whichever of our beloved presidential candidates prevails next month. Is Election Day only a month away? What’s that? Less?

Yes, fans, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

For more information:

National Federation of Independent Business
National Association for the Self-Employed
Legacy Bank
ACCION USA
An Innovation Agenda for the Next Administration (PDF)

You didn’t really think I had said everything I had to say on the subject over at The Journal Blog, did you?

That needs assessment comes to us from our friends over at REAP and, while all the survey respondents live and work in Nebraska, the results sound like almost every microbusiness I know about. Of course, researchers being the way they are, nobody is going to believe that until a few more such needs assessments come along with approximately the same results.

But you and I know better.

There’s also some news about the part of the economy that doesn’t happen on Wall Street and the year’s first assessment of the upcoming year end holiday shopping season.

For more information:

Small Businesses in Rural Nebraska: Their Needs and Thoughts
Article: Credit Crunch Hits Small Business (CNNMoney.com)
National Retail Federation
Shop.org
Article: No Such Thing as Free Shipping? (Advertising Age)

Generally, when it comes to candidates for public office, I prefer to offer you the facts and let you make up your own mind. And here’s one thing I’ve learned from covering political races: you never, ever, ever want to believe anything that one candidate says about what the other candidate plans to do. They never get the other guy’s proposals right … but, then, they aren’t trying to.

Health care policy is fairly complex stuff, so I invite you to use the links below to get more detail on what Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama are planning. It’s important to know what you’re voting for before you vote.

Also on the docket for this week’s microbusiness news: microbusiness merchants and the need to comply with credit card company’s data security standards, some preliminary data about why small business owners are concerned about the financial markets mess, and this week’s Policy Matters column — more on health insurance.

For more information:

Studies Detail Contrasts in Rivals’ Health-Care Plans (Wall Street Journal)
HealthDecision ‘08: Obama and McCain on Health Care (HealthCare.com)
Are You PCI Compliant? (my article at AmEx OPEN Forum blog) [note: article publication was rescheduled for Friday, 9/26, so this link won't be live until then]
National Small Business Association

I sound like a junkie, don’t I?

Since I wasn’t able to get to a reliable Internet connection last weekend or Monday or Tuesday (long story), what we have here is a double-length podcast. I thought that was the least I could do.

This includes the first of what I hope will be a series of pieces on specific aspects of the small business policy proposals currently being offered by the two respective major candidates for president. First up, a look at Democrat Barack Obama’s capital gains tax proposal and what it will (or won’t) do for microbusinesses.

There’s lots more, of course: women owned businesses and small disadvantaged businesses both came under scrutiny during a pair of Senate Small Business Committee shindigs, a preview of what we can expect from Congress for the rest of the current session (spoiler: not much!), an update on the first set of regulations in Advocacy’s Regulatory Review and Reform (r3) initiative, and (as always) my Policy Matters column.

For more information:

Obama/Biden Official Campaign web site
Article: Who Pays Capital Gains Tax? (Tax Policy Institute)
Hearing Archive: Business Start-up Hurdles in Underserved Communities: Access to Venture Capital and Entrepreneurship Training
Roundtable Archive: Opportunities and Challenges for Women Entrepreneurs on the 20th Anniversary of the Women’s Business Ownership Act
SBA Office of Advocacy: r3 Six Month Progress Report
SBA Office of Advocacy: Nominate a Rule for Review