This is superficially interesting, but the article is too short to explore the ramifications of the proposed changes. I'm looking at the Kauffman foundation report now (http://www.kauffman.org/research-and-policy/startup-act.aspx), but my seat-of-the-pants reaction to the proposals goes like this:

Letting in immigrant entrepreneurs who hire American workers.

Sure...but why not just open up the labor market and have done with it, rather than trying to predict in advance which immigrants will adjust the demand side? I think this is a necessity given the US's demographic problem (ie making sure there are enough workers to fund social security in the coming years), but it won't lead to endless expansion since both demographics and regional wage competition are projected to even out during the 2030s.

Reducing the cost of capital through capital gains tax relief for early stage investments.

I'd like to see numbers on this. The startup world appears to be awash in cheap capital already and that taxes are on capital gains rather than capital investments - in other words, you're not paying that tax unless your investment make a profit. Capital gains tax is already fairly low compared to income taxes, and many would argue that the problem is not early stage access to seed capital but mid-stage access to revolving capital during a period of slack demand. ISTM that demand is going to remain slack until the housing market is more predictable and the consumer debt overhang is gone.

Reducing barriers to IPOs by allowing shareholders to opt out of Sarbanes-Oxley.

This seems sensible, since the cost of compliance for SarbOx is high. But if large firms already have that priced in, how does one avoid a two-tier system whereby opted-out companies are unable to get an 'investment grade' rating for their commercial paper? Again, it would help to have some numbers quantifying the cost of compliance, and some kind of strategy for dealing with the corner cases where bad faith or incompetence result in serious losses.

Charging higher fees for patent applicants who want quick decisions to remove the backlog of applications at the Patent Office.

Wouldn't it be better for Congress to just let the patent office keep its own fees? Selling access just raises the barrier to entry and effectively cedes control of the patent landscape to big players like IV or various large corporations that already devote $$$ to patent litigation. If anything, this change would reduce the negotiating power of entrepreneurs with patentable ideas during pre-IPO funding rounds.

Giving licensing freedom to academic entrepreneurs at universities to accelerate the commercialization of their ideas.

That one went over my head - I thought this was already allowed under the Bayh-Dole act, and with relatively low transaction costs.

Having the government provide data to permit rankings of startup friendliness of states and localities.

Surely this is better provided by someone like Gartner group or some other entity. Assigning bureaucrats to the task of measuring bureaucracy seems perverse. Information about incorporation fees, median wait times, and tax regimes is already available on state websites, and evaluating it is exactly the sort of thing one pays lawyers and accountants for. That falls under 'due diligence' from an investment standpoint.

Regular sunsets for regulations and a consistent policy of putting new ones in place only if their benefits exceed their costs.

I'm for sunsets, legislative performance targets, and empirical microeconomics in general. But again, more specificity is needed here: what sort of regulations do the authors consider wasteful? There are pointless regulations like excess credentialism, but many regulations exist to address real problems. I was sort of happy to see the FDA requiring the recall of turkey meat a week or two back, since I'd rather not consume e. coli-tainted food.

EDIT: the pdf on the startup bill (at the link above) addresses quite a few of my objections, is well-argued in many respects, and is moderate rather than partisan. Still, I stand by my basic contention that much of the problem stems from economic uncertainty on the demand side, rather than a paralyzing excess of red tape on producers.

To take the HN community as an example, when did you last see people complaining about the inability to procure a business license or the complexity of buying worker's comp insurance? Has anyone actually thrown up their hands and moved their firm across state lines to reduce their fixed or marginal cost of doing business, or shut a firm down and handed the money back because the administrative costs didn't make economic sense?