As 2011 began, the president and CEO of the Credit Union National Association (CUNA) asked Congress to move forward with a law raising the lending cap for that organization’s members.

With the U.S. economy struggling to get healthy, and politicians loudly calling for action to shake loose more lending to small businesses, one would think this would have fallen into the “low-hanging fruit” category.

However, as Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry noted last month in a Des Moines speech to the Iowa Credit Union convention, nothing has happened yet.

Since 1998, credit unions have been limited to lending no more than 12.25 percent of total assets. Bill Cheney, president of CUNA, wrote to Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, in January, saying: “In the last Congress, when the administration proposed spending $30 billion of taxpayer money to encourage community banks to lend to small businesses, credit unions encouraged Congress to pass legislation to increase the credit union member business lending cap from its current level, 12.25 percent of total assets, to 27.5 percent of total assets.

“The National Credit Union Administration, the federal regulator for credit unions, has testified that any risk associated with additional credit union business loans is manageable and that the cap is not needed for safety and soundness reasons.”

IowaPolitics.com recently reported: “The Credit Union National Association estimates that lifting the cap would bring 2,495 new jobs to Iowa, or 146,000 nationwide, because of the increased capital that would be injected into the economy.”

There’s a lot of guesswork in a prediction like that, but it seems certain that making more money available to small businesses would be a good step forward in our current predicament.

Iowa Credit Union League CEO Patrick Jury was quoted: “This is a common sense solution that should be advanced by this Congress.”

Sounds reasonable.