White House proposes crowdfunding exemption | Hacker News Reader

White House proposes crowdfunding exemption

whitehouse.gov

77 pointsuripom39 comments

Seems like some very reasonable proposals that have the potential to make a huge impact.

support long-term unemployed workers who create their own jobs by starting their own companies

nationwide, interoperable wireless network for public safety

new science labs and Internet-ready classrooms

BusinessUSA within 90 days...one-stop online platform will provide access to information about the full range of government programs and services businesses need to compete globally

I'm happy to pay my taxes, personally I don't think there is a much better use of my money than improving the lives of the people in this country, or any country for that matter (once my basic needs are met, of course). Putting people to work is just an awesome side effect of improving our infrastructure and schools. If there is wasteful spending in the government, identify it, and get rid of it. There's no need to maintain some religious faith against ever raising taxes for anybody though. I mean look at today's tax rates compared to the early 80s: http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/fed_individual_rate_histo... [PDF]

It will be interesting to see if the Republicans are willing to compromise on increasing revenue, and the Democrats on entitlement programs, in order to meet the goal Obama has set for the deficit reductions, which is what will ultimately determine if The American Jobs Act will come to fruition.

There's no need to maintain some religious faith against ever raising taxes for anybody though. I mean look at today's tax rates compared to the early 80s:

Instead of focusing on one particular tax rate (marginal individual rates) and ignoring all the others, why not just look at tax revenues?

They've been more or less flat (at 18.1% of GDP) for the past 50 years.

http://www.businessinsider.com/federal-government-budget-ove...

The people arguing that taxes on high earners should not be raised (and should perhaps even be lowered) are mostly not saying "The government's revenues are too high"; they are saying that those tax rates are too high -- that higher upper-band income tax rates are unjust, or will reduce the incentive to work harder, or something of the sort.

It seems perfectly reasonable to me to respond to this by pointing out that upper-band tax rates have been distinctly higher in the past, and that innovation and wealth creation have done just fine when they were.

Incidentally, it seems pretty odd to me to say "more or less flat" and give a number as precise as 18.1% when the actual variations have been from 15% to over 20%. I wouldn't call that "more or less flat" (though I would agree there's no long-term trend, which is an entirely different matter) -- but, regardless of that, I suggest an experiment. Ask someone to plot a graph of something that's "more or less flat at 18.1%", a graph of something that's "more or less flat at 18%", or a graph of something that's "more or less flat, between 15% and 20%". I predict that the first will be much, much flatter than the actual revenue graph; the second will merely be much flatter; and the third might be about right (though probably still too flat; "varying between 15% and 20%" would most likely get you a better result).

In other words, your choice of wording gives a very false impression of how the graph actually behaves.

"It seems perfectly reasonable to me to respond to this by pointing out that upper-band tax rates have been distinctly higher in the past, and that innovation and wealth creation have done just fine when they were."

In the olden days the top tax rates were incredibly high (90%), but you didn't actually pay that; you had a ton of deductions to lower you actual paid rate.

Forgetting that argument for a second, was there an opportunity cost that doesn't exist today? With those periods of innovation and wealth creation, did they only happen because we were the "best" location at the time? As in, it didn't matter what the rates were because the US was the best place given the infrastructure you require. Now you can go to many places on the globe and get the same stuff done. Wouldn't that imply that the US has to become more competitive in order to promote growth, and part of that competitiveness (the variables we can manipulate) would be lowering marginal income taxes.

Its exciting to watch this proposal start to come to fruition. I worked in the government, and attended an Access to Capital Summit in the Dept of Treasury back in March, where I saw this proposal take bloom.

At the Summit, Jessica Jackley of Profounder and Kiva vocally voiced concern for the Reg A and Reg D restrictions on "accredited investors". Sec Geithner was in the room as well. A month afterwards, the idea had organically permeated other conversations in the White House, and meetings in the OSTP would often bring up the issue. Now it seems its finally made its way into legislative proposal.

Comes to show I think, that even though government is slow, byzantine, and sometimes impossible to access, often all it takes to get something done is to just show up and say something really provocative. Someone may listen!

How can you spend "$25 billion in K-12 school infrastructure" and "$1 billion to support NextGen air traffic modernization" "all without adding a dime to the deficit"? I think the programs should go ahead deficit or no, but it does seem like something's being left out.

Often its by just shuffling funds from certain programs to another. I believe in this particular case, they'll also use revenue-generating measures like closing tax loopholes to fund the new programs, thereby not adding to the deficit.

Kudos to KickStarter and the two projects for getting a mention on Whitehouse.gov

I wish the president had used this opportunity to support real patent reform. That could've been a huge step toward supporting startups and job creation.

How many people do you know who didn't create a startup because of patents ?

I'm not saying patent reform isn't important, but it's probably not even in the top-100 problems the average startup faces.

I think that's not how OP was thinking about it. People may not be able to create a startup--or even think to do so--because someone else's patented product could be unavailable to them (due to monopoly pricing), not because they feared that their final product wouldn't be strongly patentable. The number of people who are prohibited from even being be able to obtain the knowledge to innovate is uncountable.

Of course it's a trade-off between incentivizing innovation on one hand and enabling the spread of knowledge on the other, but needless to say the number of people who didn't create a startup because of patents is inestimable (not inestimably high, just inestimable).

Unfortunately, any such proposal would for sure bring about heavy flak fire from the Republican party (and probably from the more big-corporations-interest-sensitive Democratic representatives too) as a socialistic, un-American attitude, with the risk of stopping the whole show.

Protect IP Act passed today, I believe, which is a real bummer for actual patent reform that will promote innovation, since the system was just shifted from a 'first to invent' to a 'first to file,' supporting patent farming/fencing and litigation. Bummer :(

It passed? I haven't been able to find anything about it passing, and GovTrack[0] still shows that neither the house nor senate has voted on it.

[0]: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s112-968

Protect IP didn't pass; it was the America Invents Act (patent reform).

Thanks for the correction. I keep mixing the two up :-\

In a way, I kind of wished they had linked to something a little more relevant with the Kickstarter link. There was some strong talk about transportation infrastructure and technology leading that in the president's speech tonight

I realize it's reaching, but I think maybe using the revolights project page to suggestively highlight transportation/infrastructure is an important theme as a part of the Jobs Bill.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/revolights/revolights-jo...

If I am interpreting this correctly, they want to deregulate small-scale angel investing up to $1m? So long as the risk is largely distributed?

This sounds like a good plan, at least on the surface!

The regulations regarding funding for private firms stems from a time when it was much harder to do qualification. With the changes in technology and the emerging reputation economy, the risks of such investing have diminished. Especially if it's capped, opening up investment to the average person would cause an explosion in innovation and job creation that would offset the harm cause by fraud. I'm extremely excited by this!

That is some crazy PR for kickstarter. Wow!

I wish they had something for alien founders creating jobs.

Take a look at OpenStarts.com

sounds interesting, but I think one problem will be the number of shareholders are often limited. You may run into issues like the differences between public/private companies. Did you think of how you might solve that?

Thanks for checking it out. The companies are public and there's no limit to the number of shareholders.

I meant more in the form of U.S. startup visa, but thanks.

I do political coordinating for Startup Visa. Anything with 'visa' = immigration, which is a whole other can of (political) worms. The White House/OSTP is certainly aware of Startup Visa and understands how important it is to the tech community, as they've mentioned the policy during the Facebook and Twitter town halls, as well as the President's El Paso immigration speech. However, few in the political world have made the connection between startup visa and jobs.

In their defense, I just finished up some first order analysis, based on the Startup Genome report. Startup Visa as is currently proposed in the S. 565/H.R. 1114—supported by folks like pg and Brad Feld—would create about 15,000 jobs and nearly $1B in revenue during the first two years. To contrast this with the macroeconomic situation, the US needs to create 125,000 jobs each month to keep up with population growth. Now if someone can get me an economic multiplier number, reflecting the fact that tech companies like Facebook are highly leveraged in terms of the economic impact:jobs creation ratio, that'd be a different fish on Capitol Hill...

Assumptions: cap of '10,000-X' visas, based on the number of unused visas in the EB-5 Investor Visa that would be made available as Startup Visas; no more than 4000 EB-5 visas have ever been granted in a single year to date; 5000 Startup Visas is a reasonable first-order guess

Data comes from the Startup Genome survival rates, jobs created per startup stage, and revenue ranges.

I'm looking for help for anyone interested in advancing Startup Visa on Capitol Hill, so drop me a message: http://www.quora.com/Craig-Montuori

Also, if anyone's interested, there's a call tomorrow hosted by the White House on the 'America Jobs Act': "Business Leaders Briefing Call

What: Overview of President Obama's “American Jobs Act” Who: A Senior White House Official Time: 1:00 p.m. EDT Conference Call Number: (866) 615-1890 Participant Access Code: 216408"

Trillions for banksters, millions for the entrepreneurs. It's a start I suppose.

This is the kind of worthless comment I hoped would never become commonplace on Hacker News. There's no argument here. There's no point. It's just an snide jab with an information content of zero. If you disagree with the article, say specifically why. If you agree, say specifically why.

I think wavephorm makes a valid point. The government has been giving huge sums to the banking industry to bail it out, a fact. And a tiny fraction of that to entrepreneurs, also a fact.

If the US had more startup-friendly policies, you could imaging a $100B fund, still 1/40th of the banking industry bailout, that could have a huge positive effect.

Being aware of the disparity is the first step toward correcting it.

No, because instead of saying this he just had a snarky remark. Exactly what financial issues of recent times is he taking issue with? The TARP bailout? The stimulus? Is he arguing that this project in and of itself would produce more benefit for the financial industry than entrepreneurs? I can't nail down his position because he didn't use enough words to explain his point.

Aside: Using "banksters" is like using "M$"; all it does is show everyone that you can't make your point without resorting to the maturity of a 5-year-old.

Giving or lending? I can't find accurate numbers. Much of the money was loaned to companies to weather the crisis. It had to be paid back. How would lending to a bunch of risky startups make things better? The govt should create an environment where it is desirable for entrepreneurs and investors to take risks.

Anyway, whining about the financial crisis and saying they got more is pointless. What is the best way to create a system in which startups can thrive? Guaranteed loans for everyone probably isn't the answer.

If I offer to buy something from you worth $1 and give you $100 for it do you consider that a $99 loan?

Yes TARP was paid back by the banks. The bigger problem is the highly overvalued junk assets the government assumed from them though. It's into the trillions and is being downplayed by the media.

He did say why he disagreed--because the amount of this program is minuscule compared to the amount spent on bank bailouts. You can disagree with him, but that sounds like a perfectly valid point to me.

I hope comments like yours will disappear first.

Yes he did not say anything we didn't already know but he did put them together in a novel way, thereby increasing atleast my understanding of events.

Your comment on the other hand did no such thing.

There are 3 other comments in this thread so far. Care to explain how mine differs from them?

  If you disagree with the article, say specifically why. If you agree, say specifically why.

My succinct point was that the US federal government has given literally trillions of dollars to US banking institutions, while giving little to nothing to people who create jobs. Giving a bit of funding to entrepreneurs is maybe a step in the right direction for a change.

From the outside looking in, I really don't understand why Obama's approval ratings are at an all time low. I wish the UK were as elegantly pragmatic as this.

Because it is lip service only. This plan will be muddled by congress as to benefit primarily the large institutions that are their donors, rather than the intended swath of USians. When that happens, don't expect Obama to be outraged. The exact same thing happened with health care, tax rates, debt cap, etc.

The U.S. economy is stalled because of a wave of government legislative activism (health care, finance, bailouts, energy, labor) unseen here since the New Deal.

>The U.S. economy is stalled because of a wave of government legislative activism

Really? I thought it was that dive in consumer demand.

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