Sometimes, it's pretty easy to let yourself be amazed by what lawmakers get excited about.

Let's face it: fiscal responsibility rhetoric aside, the SBA's funding is a drop in the bucket of the overall federal budget.

Which means, among other things, that no matter how much waste, fraud, abuse and duplication Congressional overseers are likely to ferret out, the savings involved are likely to represent a drop in the bucket of the federal government's multi-trillion dollar red ink.

So it's difficult to take inquiries into a drop in a drop in the bucket seriously when balanced against other federal expenditures — like the amount of money the federal government doles out to large corporations.

It seems to me that the money poured by unwilling taxpayers into the coffers of huge corporate multi-nationals that make tens of billions of dollars in annual profits — up to and including the tax expenditures that permit such companies to legally have a tax bill of zero — is probably much more worthy of scrutiny.

It would be interesting to see some sort of pie chart illustrating the federal government investment, in dollars, in different U.S. firms by size class.

Of course, it might be argued that those huge companies are worth the tax expenditures because of all the income they generate, all the jobs they create, and all the wealth they add to the gross domestic product.

But, besides the fact that the return on investment, at 0%, is pretty poor for the aforementioned taxpayer, there is the question of what the result would be if the shoe were on the other foot.

What do you think it would to the economy if the federal government spent that much money investing in small and microbusinesses?

We'd know the answer to that question, if policy makers meant what they said about small businesses, wouldn't we?