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Just another sorry tale of our government in action, or rather “in inaction,” so to speak. Read it here because you won’t find it elsewhere: no scandals, no sex, no villains. Nothing but good intentions and prize ineptitude, and the only ones that get hurt are small trucker outfits that drift into ditches and quietly expire from lack of economic oxygen.

There’s not space enough in our allotted 450 words for anything but a short synopsis of this story. If you want to read it all, check out Clarissa Kell-Holland’s smart investigative pieces in Landline Magazine. The gist is that the Small Business Administration is trying to make low-interest loans to help small businesses survive the Great Recession. Small truckers (like you, pal) are eminently qualified for these loans and the SBA is eager to do its part. So how come nobody’s getting the loans?

This money is $350 million that has been designated America’s Recovery Capital Program: “ARC” for short, because it’s supposed to be, in the words of SBA Administrator Karen Mills, “a bridge over troubled waters for struggling but viable small businesses.”

Inspiring words, though granted, $350 million is only what the average investment banker expects for his Christmas bonus. Even so, a typical ARC loan of $35,000 can help a trucker gear out of the ditch and get back on the road. Unfortunately, so far only 7% of this money, $26 million, has been lent. Why? The reasons are several but the chief bottleneck is that few banks are interested in participating. “It’s not that we don’t want to do these loans,” says one executive. “We can’t deliver this product because there isn’t any profit.… It’s an accounting nightmare.”

This is not just ‘bankergripe.’ Neal Gordon of the Small Business Alliance currently works with 25 customers to complete their ARC paperwork. The ARC program is, in his words, “just a clunker without the cash.” To Gordon, the chief disincentive is the paperwork, as much as the SBA requires for a much-heftier $2 million loan!

And the banks aren’t the only ones unhappy with the red tape. An anonymous contributor to a blog on business.gov, which is an “official site of the United States Government” (created to help small businesses deal with Federal loans and regulations) complains: Good luck trying to get anyone to even fax you a 25-page application. Yep, 25 pages! Would they also like your first-born for God’s sake?  This is ridiculous!

We could go on, but you can see where this is heading. We enjoy carping about the government (any government) as much as anyone, but Truckonomics is supposed to be constructive journalism. This is our rant for the year and we promise from now on to have something positive and cheerfully-spirited to say, even about a program that one banker describes as “designed to fail.”

Darn! Broke our promise already!