Rejoinder to Charles D. Tansey: Moving Toward a More Effective Small Business Administration

Abstract

Former Small Business Administration (SBA) Deputy Administrator Charles Tansey defends the SBA’s record, countering criticisms appearing in the author’s August 2000 Economic Development Quarterly article. He defends the venture capital incentives contained in the SBA’s New Market Venture Capital program. Yet these incentives are based on a debenture financing scheme that failed when used previously to support venture capital investing in the SBA’s Small Business Investment Company program. Tansey defends the SBA’s record of expanding loan guarantees to minority business borrowers in the 1990s. These guarantees, however, have increasingly flowed to high-net-worth Asian immigrant borrowers rather than the minority groups most prone to have limited access to financing. The SBA is wedded to outdated strategies and concepts that have lost their applicability to 21st-century problems. A pragmatic rethinking of the agency’s financing mission is overdue.