Veterans Entrepreneurship Act of 2015
Floor Speech
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Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Every day, American soldiers are risking their lives and leaving family and friends and loved ones behind to protect our freedoms and defend the United States. Currently, there are over 21 million veterans living all across the United States. When these brave men and women return home, they strive to transition seamlessly, hopefully, back into their civilian lives.
Veterans face challenges in that transition, one of those being employment. Our most recent veterans who have served in Active Duty at any time since September 2001 have a higher unemployment rate than the average civilian. In particular, our recent female veterans have an unemployment rate that is over twice the national average.
While finding employment upon transition to civilian life is a challenge,many veterans find that skills learned during military service translate well into entrepreneurship. Yet many veterans have found it difficult to obtain the funds needed to start a small business.
In looking for ways to finance their new businesses, veterans may turn to the Small Business Administration, the SBA, for loan assistance. In fiscal year 2014, veterans received over 2,000 7(a) loans, totaling almost $600 million, but I believe we can do more to get these loans into the hands of veterans. Already the SBA Administrator is using her authority to waive certain fees charged to veterans.
One way to increase veterans' access to capital is to make SBA loans more affordable for veterans by permanently waiving the up-front fee charged by the SBA to borrowers through the agency's 7(a) express loan program. H.R. 2499 does just that, all at no cost to the taxpayer.
H.R. 2499 strikes a delicate balance between providing a fee waiver to help America's veterans while safeguarding scarce taxpayer dollars by creating an exception to the fee waiver in any year where an appropriation is necessary to cover the cost of the overall 7(a) loan program. This ensures that this fee waiver will never have a cost to the taxpayer.
I believe, as many Americans do, that we must support our veterans, and this legislation provides support to veteran entrepreneurs for years to come at no cost. It is a smart, commonsense approach which had broad bipartisan support and passed out of our committee by a voice vote, meaning basically everyone supported it on the committee.
Further, this bill has support from major veterans' groups who are well aware of the challenges that brave veterans face in transitioning to civilian life.
I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 2499, and I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. In closing, I would, first of all, like to acknowledge that Mr. Knight, who just spoke, is a veteran himself, and we certainly appreciate his service to our country.
Again, I want to stress that H.R. 2499 will provide greater assistance to our veterans without imposing any additional costs on taxpayers.
The enactment of H.R. 2499 then represents only a small token of the appreciation that we can show to our veterans as they take their skills learned through service to create small businesses that will help create jobs, thus serving our country a second time. I urge my colleagues to vote ``yes'' on H.R. 2499.
I yield back the balance of my time.
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