President Barack Obama knows that job creation is of critical importance. He also knows that small businesses, historically, create most of the nation’s net new jobs. He believes the government should, therefore, help small businesses.

This all sounds good, right? Unfortunately, the help the president has offered doesn’t match what small business owners most want and need.

Having skipped the critical step of asking the small business community what would help most, the president and his administration have defaulted to the standard government answer: Help small businesses get loans!

Government efforts to increase access to credit assume that many small business owners want loans and can repay them, and that banks don’t have any money to lend.

Research shows these assumptions are not true. Though access to credit certainly can be a challenge for entrepreneurs, it has stayed near the bottom of the overall small business wish list. The big problem for them remains “poor sales.”

National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) survey data from last fall showed that few small business owners are even bothering to ask for loans, and many who want them are having their needs met.

Of small employers in NFIB’s credit survey who did not seek credit, only 15 percent were “discouraged” borrowers – those who wanted loans but didn’t make the effort because they had little confidence in succeeding. Two-fifths of those who tried to get credit got all they wanted, one-fifth got most of their desired funds, and only 16 percent failed.

The credit market is fluid, of course, but ongoing surveys of NFIB’s membership of about 350,000 small business owners still show about 90 percent consistently reporting that all their credit needs are being met or that they are not interested in borrowing. Fewer than 10 percent report that not all of their credit needs have been satisfied.

Is the lending environment frustrating for those who have failed to obtain credit? Absolutely. But the big picture is not one of a small business credit crisis.

Washington bureaucrats are surprised by these numbers, but there is a common-sense explanation behind them. Unlike the government, small business owners need to be confident that they can pay off their debts before taking out new loans. With the economy still shaky, sales still struggling and our national leadership still having a tin ear for small business concerns, entrepreneurs don’t have the confidence they need to invest in their businesses with borrowed money.

When it comes to helping their enterprises expand and hire more workers, small businesses actually say that less will be more. They want less government interference (not government handouts or bailouts), less regulation and less taxation.

The only thing they ask for more of is certainty – and that must come from a more stable political environment.

Given the freedom and the certainty they need to move, grow and hire, they will. The right policies will provide that environment. And that is worth more than any government-backed loan.

Dan Danner is president and CEO of the National Federation of Independent Business, which represents 350,000 small business owners in Washington, D.C., and every state capital.