The business world is slowly recovering from the shock-waves of the recession. A new bill from the Senate is aimed at assisting businesses create jobs and access credit and capital. According to WEB CPA, the Senate introduced the Small Business Jobs Act that would help small businesses create jobs, by allowing investors to exclude 100% of the gains from the sale of stock from their income for tax purposes if the stock is held for more than five years. "Small businesses are the engine of our economy and need to be a critical focus of our job-creation efforts," said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Caucus, a senator from Montana, to the news source. " Helping small businesses helps get American back to work. Working together, we crafted our bill to promote entrepreneurship and investment in small businesses and provide small businesses with the vital access to capital they need to create jobs." This bill would create a Small Business Lending Fund of $30 billion to provide capital investment to small banks to increase small business lending. In addition it would also establish a State Small Business Credit Initiative, which would give $900 million in grants to successful state small business programs that are already in existence. According to the Small Business Association, as of 2005 small businesses represent 99.7% of businesses in the U.S. and employ more than 55 million people.  |