Everybody in Washington loves small businesses. We know that because they tell us so — often.

I suppose it's nice to be loved, even if it doesn't seem to make much of a difference.

There are plenty of people who, when talking about small business policy, want to talk about the SBA and about its flagship loan program — just as if that is the best or most important or perhaps the only relevant policy to be had.

So, it probably shouldn't be all that surprising to find that the Obama Administration seems to number among that sort.

Just like it shouldn't really be all that much of a surprise that access to capital is the only tune President Obama seems to know when it comes to small businesses.

There are more than 27 million small businesses in the country and most of them don't rely on debt financing beyond their credit cards for much of anything. Most of them bootstrap their way to success.

It's an interesting lesson in the way that small business policy often has very little to do with real small businesses, don't you think?

Right now, the most important issue for small businesses is paying customers, whether those customers are consumers or other businesses. Obviously, the only real way the government could help there would be for the government to buy things from small businesses.

The only problem with that is that selling things to the government is such an arduous task that most small businesses aren't interested — no matterhow much money they could make that way.

Of course, there are things that could be done to make the process more small business friendly but that is something nobody seems to want to tackle.

Oh, by the way, it's Small Business Week.

I suspect, for most of the small business owners I know, that doesn't make much of a difference, either.