Everything is beginning to sound eerily familiar.

The House Small Business Committee is talking about loan programs and paperwork burdens and regulations and collateral and loan volume.

Over in the Senate, the conversation addressed funding the entrepreneurial development programs and how critical and beneficial they are and how important it is to expand their reach.

Does anything strike you as odd about all this?

I mean, here we are, in a new century with all kinds of new technologies and platforms, making new business models possible and profitable. Small businesses are smaller than ever and they are connecting and doing business in all sort of new ways.

As is the case when you have new technologies and new business models, we are starting to see new scenarios that were not contemplated by the current statutory regime. We get other scenarios that illustrate newly-evolved policy needs that cover the new ways those ever-smaller small businesses operate.

Is current law getting in the way of microbusinesses trying to do business, simply by virtue of being out-of-date?

Are microbusinesses falling between the cracks with respect to any of the relevant issues, for the same reason?

How have technology and those changing business models I mentioned caused the policy needs of microbusinesses to change over the last couple of decades?

What are those new policy needs and just how are they different from those of larger small businesses?

And, by the way, why aren't the House or Senate Small Business Committees asking any of these questions?

Of course, a big part of the problem is that the ongoing conversation is taking place among the same small group of people, over and over again. Many of those people have agendas that are older than my college-aged children.

So, the issues may have all sorts of new wrinkles but none of the relevant players seem to be up to speed on them.

It seems pretty clear that all sorts of somebodies aren't getting out often enough.