Sba Loan Quotes

Quoting page 144: Organized minority groups competing for official recognition were quick to punish government officials for treating their group less favorably than others. In 1978, when Congress in the Small Business Investment Act provided a statutory basis for the SBA’s 8(a) program, the law omitted Asian-Americans from the list of minorities (blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans) considered presumptively “socially and economically disadvantaged.” Responding to this omission, Asian-American groups hammered the SBA, which within a year reinstated them among the presumptively eligible groups. Yet there was something bizarre about awarding taxpayer-subsidized business grants and loans to members of the country’s top income strata on the grounds that all members of the groups were presumed to be socially disadvantaged.

Quoting page 32: Third, the riots spurred aggressive efforts by federal officials to dampen the violence by speeding delivery of benefits, especially jobs paying good wages, to urban minorities who found little payoff in the civil right legislation of 1964-65. The Small Business Administration (SBA), seeking to aid proprietors of riot-damaged stores and to encourage minority ownership in urban rebuilding efforts, established in 1968 the section 8(a) program. Targeted to aid heavily damaged core areas through grants and subsidized business loans, the 8(a) program avoided the racial quota taboo by funneling aid to “socially disadvantaged” persons, not to minorities per se. But most participants in the 8(a) program were minority business entrepreneurs.