In this political season, there will be a lot of dialogue about the Small Business Administration as a possible solution to the small-business lending crisis in America. As two examples, the S.B.A.’s administrator, Karen Mills, spoke recently at the Democratic National Convention and Robb Mandelbaum wrote a post for this blog about the effect a Romney administration might have on the S.B.A. budget.
And that’s an important conversation to have. But it’s also important to keep something in mind about the S.B.A.: it is actually a very small part of overall small-business lending in America. This is easy to forget when government officials and politicians are hiding behind S.B.A. programs and stats, using them as benchmark for the state of small-business lending and implicitly suggesting that the S.B.A. can solve all small-business problems.
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