Lots of folks in Washington talk about helping entrepreneurs—now’s the time for action.

That’s the message that came out of a roundtable held today by the Senate Small Business & Entrepreneurship Committee on ways to strengthen high-growth entrepreneurship in the United States. The committee’s Democratic chair, Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, plans to craft legislation to accomplish this goal in early spring. Other committees will have to do the same thing, she said, since Landrieu’s panel only has jurisdiction over Small Business Administration programs—it can’t do anything about taxes, regulatory policy, immigration, or securities laws.

But Landrieu said her committee will be “singularly focused” on how to create a better environment for entrepreneurs and “will keep the accelerator down on this” in order to encourage other committees to act.

This committee process, however, may take too long, even if Landrieu keeps up the pressure she promises.

Plus, legislation already exists that addresses many of the concerns identified by entrepreneurs. It’s called the Startup Act, a bill sponsored by Senator Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican, and Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat. The legislation, which is modeled on recommendations from the Kauffman Foundation, would exempt investments in small C corporations from capital gains taxes and cut income taxes for startups during their first three years. The bill also calls for the Government Accountability Office to study the effects of making compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act’s audit requirements voluntary for small public companies.

In addition, the bill would accelerate commercialization of university-based research. It also would give visas to foreign students with graduate degrees from U.S. universities in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics and create a new visa for immigrants who start businesses here.

“I think there’s a window of opportunity here in the next two months,” Moran told Landrieu’s committee.

Congress needs to act on these ideas now, Moran said, and not give in to the conventional wisdom that it’s an election year and therefore too hard to get legislation passed. He noted that President Barack Obama announced his own legislative agenda for entrepreneurship Tuesday, one that overlapped in some areas with the Startup Act.

If the country does nothing to foster the growth of new, innovative companies—the ones responsible for most net new jobs—then “we’ll be further surpassed” by other countries that are improving their entrepreneurial environments, he said.

“Time is of the essence for this,” said Jonathan Ortmans, a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation.

Representatives from 120 nations will attend an upcoming conference in the United Kingdom on how to build stronger startup ecosystems, he noted. Although 80 percent of venture capital is still invested in the United States, several Silicon Valley venture capital firms have set up shop in China. They will soon fund competitors to U.S. businesses, said Barry Evans, CEO of Calxeda, an Austin, Texas-based company that is developing low-power computer servers based on cell-phone technology.

Evans said his company needs to be able to go public in order to continue growing, but “the bar is too high right now.” He’d welcome relief from Sarbanes-Oxley Act requirements.

Smaller companies could benefit from crowdfunding, a technique using the Internet to solicit small investments from lots of investors. Obama has called for legislation that would make this possible.

“By the way, Mr. President, that bill is all ready to go,” said Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts, the Republican sponsor of the Senate’s crowdfunding bill.

Similar legislation passed the House in November by a 407-17 vote, but it’s “stuck in committee” in the Senate, Brown said.

Getting it unstuck and getting Congress to pass the Startup Act or something like it is going to be a challenge. But the sooner Congress acts, the greater the chances of avoiding the partisan gridlock that inevitably will set in as Election Day approaches in November.

Congress needs to “capitalize on the goodwill and bipartisan atmosphere that surrounds this issue of startups,” Ortmans said.

---

Kent Hoover is the Washington bureau chief for bizjournals.