Startup Act 2.0 To be Introduced Today

On May 22, 2012 a new bill called The Start-Up Act 2.0 will be introduced in Congress.

It will be built upon the Start-Up Act introduced by Sen. Moran and Warner last year. U.S. Senators Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Chris Coons (D-Del.), Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) along with Steve Case, Revolution LLC CEO and member of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, and Robert Litan of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, will unveil this bipartisan legislation. Among other things, the Start-Up Act 2.0 aims to do the following:

1. Create an Entrepreneur’s Visa for legal immigrants.
2. Create a new STEM visa so that U.S.-educated foreign students who graduate with a master’s or a doctorate in science, technology, engineering or mathematics can receive a green card and stay in this country, launch businesses and create jobs.
3. Eliminates the per-country caps for employment-based immigrant visas.

A few of its other provisions are:

• making permanent the exemption of capital-gains taxes on the sale of certain small-business stock held for at least five years;
• creating a targeted research and development tax credit for businesses less than five years old and with less than $5 million in annual receipts;
• using existing federal funding to support taxpayer-funded university initiatives designed to bring research to the marketplace more quickly;
• requiring all government agencies to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of all proposed rules and regulations with an economic impact of $100 million or more.

22 May 2012