Allow me to paint a picture for you.

The Small Business Administration, according to the information posted at its web site, has been helping small businesses with access to capital since its inception fifty-three years ago. That is and always has been a central part of its core mission.

There are approximately 24 million small businesses in this country. Of these, 90% or about 22 million, are microbusinesses.

In 2005, the ASPEN Institute's FIELD study produced a report estimating that there were 10.8 million microbusinesses in the United States that were having difficulty accessing bank financing.

That's about half the microbusinesses, and 45% of all small businesses, in the country.

Research produced by the Roslow Research Group for ACCION USA found these details about access to capital issues among low to moderate income microentrepreneurs:

• 45.7% of them had never even considered a bank loan for their business;
• 41.5% had considered a bank loan but thought they'd be turned down, thought the process would be too cumbersome, or thought they would have to produce too much information; and
• 12.9% had applied for a loan but had been rejected.

The National Association for the Self-Employed published the results of a survey earlier this year, in which 77% of microbusiness owners said they felt that funding sources for microbusinesses were inadequate.

The same survey showed that only 1% of the owners of established microbusinesses say they are able to access SBA-backed financing, while another 9% securing traditional bank financing.

So, you see, when I complain about the lack of microbusiness-specific financing resources, I'm not making this stuff up.

The question in my mind is this: if the SBA is supposed to be helping small businesses with access to capital issues but 45% of the small businesses in the country are having trouble getting financing for their businesses, wouldn't that mean something clearly isn't working?

And if all that is true, then why isn't there more urgency attached to addressing this very basic problem?

Somebody told me recently that the people on Capitol Hill don't pay attention to microbusinesses because they are too small and too low-revenue to care about.

Stuff like this makes it look like they were right.