Creating Financial Prosperity for Businesses and Investors Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. Speaker, I am here to speak about one of the ideas in this package that I have, shall we say, 5 or 6 years in; and the interesting thing, it was a conversation back and forth with a number of Democrats on the other side. It was one of those--it started as sort of a philosophical debate.

Often you hear us fussing at each other here on the floor, and we will get into these debates of, well, the concentration of wealth in the country; you know, the number of folks who now hold so much wealth.

Yet, if you take a step backwards and look at the way we have our laws set up in this country, we don't decide that you get to invest in certain types of activities because of your talent. We don't decide you get to invest in certain activities because you are an expert in the technology or the business model.

We actually have a series of rules that, if you have $1 million, you and your wife have a certain income, then you are allowed to invest. You think about that. So if I came to you right now and said, I am going to judge you by the size of your bank account and not by your competence, that would be pretty outrageous.

I guess for years and years, none of us had really sort of talked about it, thought about it in that way, that the arbitrary rules that the SEC and we had allowed to continue were a world where we judged people by their wealth and then gave them additional opportunities instead of handing those same opportunities to people because of their expertise in investing or the technology, their expertise in understanding the risk profile of such technology. I am hoping that is where we are heading.

There was a number of compromises to make both sides feel comfortable, and that is actually one of the reasons we had such a bipartisan vote; and to that, I also thank my friend, Chairman Garrett.
I am going to miss you because you have worked hard to shepherd many of these concepts through for years now.

I think this is a great start because we are going to start judging our brothers and sisters by their talents and not necessarily their bank account size, and that is why I am so happy on this one.

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