Political Quotes

“I rise today, along with Senator Mary Landrieu, Chair of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, to introduce the Strengthening Entrepreneurship for America's Veterans Act. This critical legislation, which is a slightly modified version of language we included in S. 1229, the Entrepreneurial Development Act of 2009, will establish a nationwide Veterans' Business Center program, housed at the Small Business Administration, or SBA, to tailor counseling and outreach programs for aspiring veteran entrepreneurs. This program will build on the extraordinary work of the SBA's Office of Veterans Business Development, headed by Bill Elmore, which currently oversees eight such centers and last year counseled or trained over 120,000 veterans. According to the Department of Veteran Affairs, almost 2 million brave American men and women have deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq since the beginning of combat operations in September 2001, nearly 1.2 million of whom are now veterans. Regrettably, the unemployment rate among these veterans stands at 13.1 percent over three percentage points higher than the national average. It is critical that when our Nation's service-members return from duty, they receive the assistance they deserve to seamlessly assimilate back to civilian life. Many of these veterans are aspiring entrepreneurs seeking to open their own business and live the American dream.”