The Small Business Jobs Act, poised to pass the Senate this week, contains provisions that will do more to damage small businesses than all the decent provisions combined. The bill is another swing-and-a-miss for Democrats trying to bolster their small business creds…

The Small Business Administration released its Procurement Scorecard late Friday afternoon, showing that once again, the government did not achieve its mandated 23 percent small business procurement goal. Several weeks ago, I made several predictions about this, lets see how accurate I was.

Time to test my psychic abilities. The Small Business Administration will be releasing the contracting numbers for fiscal year 2009, which will show another disappointing year for small businesses.

In the USA:

Why Small Business Loans Are Important

The economy has lost 8.4 million jobs since the start of the recession. Small businesses employ the majority of the American workforce, although the largest single employer is still the federal government.

When the economy starts to recover small businesses rely on loans to bring up their inventory levels. Large banks and smaller institutions have been reluctant to introduce new loans after the failure of a large number banking institutions.

Small banks do not have the resources to start lending again, and the number of new loans have gone down since the start of the recession.

Banks that received funds from the Troubled Asset Relief program. The larger banks that were branded as too big to fail have also reduced the number of new loans they make to small businesses. They have reinvested the funds in lower-return, lower-risk treasury bonds instead.

And elsewhere …

45,000 Small Businesses closed in 2009 in the United States of America. The average number of employees for Small Businesses is just under five each. That’s an estimated 225,000 people added to the unemployment lines. Because banks were so stingy with Small Business loans last year, many of those who closed their doors did so because their cash flow resources were no longer available. Many other small businesses were able to survive only by cutting wages, labor, or laying employees off altogether.