Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, secrecy in political spending has been an issue of growing concern to small businesses. Small business owners across the political spectrum agree on this problem: In a poll released last year, 66 percent of small business owners said they thought the Citizens United decision was bad for small businesses; only 9 percent thought it was good.

While fully fixing the damage of Citizens United is a long-term effort, there is a short-term remedy: a proposal for a new rule at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission requiring publicly traded companies to disclose their political spending. As a small business owner, I hope the SEC acts quickly to adopt this proposal.

Last week, the CEOs of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and the National Association of Manufacturers signed a letter in defense of secret political spending. It’s hard to grasp how anyone who believes in free market competition would defend information secrecy. Access to information is a tenet of basic economics.