“It’s not a lot of fun being a small-business owner right now,” Manny Molina, who launched the company six years ago, said.

And the disastrous business climate is as obvious in the numbers. From the beginning of 2008 through the third quarter of 2009, 89,056 businesses had filed for bankruptcy, 45,510 in the first nine months of 2009 alone, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute. If bankruptcies continued through the fourth quarter at the same pace as through the first three quarters, 60,680 businesses will have filed for bankruptcy this year, more than any year since 1993.

In California alone, the Los Angeles Times reports, small-business bankruptcies were up 81 percent in the 12 months ended September 30, compared with the previous year. Brian Headd, an economist at the Small Business Administration's office of advocacy, told the L.A. Times: "While bankruptcies are up overall, small-business closures are up even more."

So it’s little wonder that the National Federation of Independent Business monthly survey for December still shows gloom among small-business owners. “Owner optimism remains stuck at recession levels,” writes William Dunkelberg, the small-business lobbying organization’s chief economist, and Holly Wade.

The NFIB finds that small businesses are holding off on capital spending, and that more of them plan to cut employment than plan to add to it.

And it’s little wonder that President Barack Obama is jawboning bankers to do more small-business lending and that the federal government is making more money available to small businesses through Small Business Administration loans. Obama has signed a bill to help provide additional funding to the SBA that will support $4.5 billion in small-business lending, with that lending expected to start December 28.

Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis responded to the president’s call earlier this month for more lending by promising the nation’s biggest bank would increase its small-business lending by $5 billion in the next year.

Obama followed up his meeting with big bankers earlier this month with one with representatives of community banks this week. And again, his message was: Boost lending to small business. He promised to streamline the process of getting money from the government’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program into the hands of small banks to lend to small business.

And all of that may well be good for getting businesses more liquid. But here’s the question: If bankruptcy is a problem of not having enough money to pay back the debts you already have, how is it that more lending is going to keep even more businesses from going bust?