JOBS Act

Floor Speech

Mr. HUIZENGA of Michigan. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address the House and to address the Nation today.

As a small business owner, I know the importance of fostering and creating an environment that promotes job creation, economic security and opportunity, and allows especially small businesses to grow.

I also know that Americans and Michiganders and those in the Second District in my home State of Michigan and across the country are looking for real solutions that will grow jobs now. That's why I support the JOBS Act. It will jump-start our economy and restore opportunities for America's primary job creators: our small businesses, start-ups, and entrepreneurs.

Now, I've been around long enough in my first year here, Mr. Speaker, to unfortunately see that sometimes you have to repackage ideas and put a different colored bow on it for people to accept it because what we're going to be passing has been passed. I sit on the Financial Services Committee. We've passed a number of these bills--and all of these bills, I believe. That's part of the America's Job Creators Plan that the House Republicans have put forward. But what we're doing today is we are going to be putting this JOBS Act; it's compromised of six bills that have been approved by the committee. Very quickly, those six bills are:

One, Reopening the American Capital Markets to Emerging Growth Companies Act. What that's going to do is it's going to allow temporary relief from some of the onerous SEC, or Securities and Exchange Commission, regulations that are on those small businesses.

Number two, the Access to Capital for Job Creators Act is going to allow small companies to raise capital by, again, removing some of those regulatory bans that are in there and that say that a small business can't use advertisements to go try to get and attract investors. Well, in an age of Internet and those kinds of things, that has a huge impact. It also brings along a concept that's been out there called crowdfunding.

That's the third bill, Entrepreneur Access to Credit Act. It is also going to ease the requirements that allow things like crowdfunding, people being able to go and spread this out on Facebook and Twitter and Internet and to their friends, to pull in those small-dollar investors that are going to be able to give them the capital that they need to launch that innovative idea.

Well, the fourth is the Small Company Capital Formation Act. It allows small businesses to go public by elevating the threshold that companies are exempt from $5 million to $50 million. That is going to be able to really, truly impact those small entrepreneurs and small business owners who are looking to take their business to the next step.

The fifth one is the Private Company Flexibility and Growth Act. That's expected to give small companies more room to grow before having to go public. Currently, there's a regulation that says you can have no more than 500 investors in your small company. This doubles that. This says you can have up to 1,000. We believe that that is also going to be able to allow those small businesses who are in transition, who are in that acquisition mode, who are in that growth mode, to be able to go up there and be successful.

Finally, number six, the Capital Expansion Act would increase the number of shareholders allowed to invest in a community bank from 500 to 2,000. Why would we include this part? Well, community banks really are the backbone of many of those small investors. They're the ones that they go to church with and shop at the grocery store with. They know their businesses. They may know that it's been a long-term relationship with that local community bank. By being able to expand the footprint of those community banks, we're going to be able to expand their lending power as well to those small businesses.

Well, it's interesting that here we actually have a bipartisan package of bills. This isn't just something that's the Republicans' ideas. In fact, in the Financial Services Committee, we had this as bipartisan votes. And really, it truly is going to help create a healthier environment for small businesses to hire and expand.

In fact, President Obama's administration released what's called a Statement of Administration Policy yesterday supporting this very act. We welcome his support and recognition of this bill's innovative solutions to ensure that small businesses can access capital needed to expand, hire, and invest. And again, that's because you, the American people, we here in the House of Representatives are looking for those real honest solutions.

Well, it's far time that we get government out of the way of small businesses as well, the engine of our economy. We need to focus on the real economy, and our priority has to be that focus.

According to the Kauffman Foundation, start-up companies created nearly 40 million jobs, 40 million jobs since 1980, and the Small Business Administration shows small businesses generate over 60 percent of all the new jobs created here in the U.S. Sixty percent of all those jobs that we are hoping to have in this country are created by these small businesses.

In fact, even the World Bank has a report. It's called ``Doing Business,'' and it showed that the United States has fallen to 13th for the ``ease of starting a business.''

So with that, Mr. Speaker, I appreciate this as a key to lasting, honest economic recovery. And we need--America needs--these real jobs, real solutions, and real results right now.

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