GOP Freshmen Hour

Floor Speech

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Mr. YOUNG of Indiana. Thank you so much for your hard work on this issue and your leadership on so many other efforts. I can certainly identify with the comments that you've made and that the gentlelady, my fellow colleague from Alabama, has made. We've seen an uptick certainly in my district of these numbers of notices and penalties that the aggregates businesses, for example, in my district receive, oftentimes for petty little issues. And it seems that there has been an increase in the enforcement from this administration on some things where frankly you ought to have these agencies working with our businesses, helping them come into compliance, consulting with them, doing even a little cost-benefit analysis on the ground level. We've lost all sense of perspective.

I have to say as someone who has just been here for a year and a half, I've been a little surprised by a number of things, but perhaps it was my own naivete that led me to expect most of my constituents' concerns would be related to how we should vote on a given matter.

Vote ``no'' on this resolution. Vote ``yes'' on that given bill. But instead, so much of what I have heard over the last 1 1/2 years has been, as much as anything else: Stop this regulation from being enforced. It's really killing our business. It's hurting job creation right here in our part of the country. How can you rein in these executive mandates? So I've tried to do my part, and others have here as well.

I'll cite my colleague from Indiana, Congressman Todd Rokita, who has worked very hard on a project the last year and a half that he calls the Red Tape Rollback. I hold right here in my hand a report which Congressman Rokita's office recently put out, the catalogs, these regulatory concerns of businesses in my home State and the job-destroying effects of overregulation. It turns out there's a reason why so many businesses in the Hoosier State are suddenly feeling the crushing effect of regulation, and it's because we've seen a sharp increase in regulations under this administration.

Let me throw out some numbers here:

Since 2008, there have been over 34,000 regulators added to the government's payroll;

Additional regulatory costs have increased by $46 billion per year since the beginning of 2009;

The number of regulations with an economic impact of $100 million or more--so-called ``major regulations''--has increased by 32 just last year. By comparison, the last President only added 28 such regulations in his first 3 years in office. All told, this President added 106 through the end of last year.

So the list goes on and on. I know my colleagues can add to this list--parade of horribles--with respect to regulations. Something needs to change up here. I'm glad we're here tonight to talk about a particular bill that will change things for the better.

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Mr. YOUNG of Indiana. To write new regulations, to go out there and to pore through private sector books, to be boots on the ground to enforce these existing regulations. So we've got 34,000 more individuals who are interfering with private sector activity.

Now, I use the word ``interfering.'' I acknowledge there are cases where we have to have regulations. I think everyone here would agree with that sentiment. But things have gotten out of whack, and we're really constraining job creation at a time when our constituents want us to be creating more jobs.

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Mr. YOUNG of Indiana. In everything you've described--from the sports analogy, where people are afraid to go onto the field because they don't know the game, to the direct impact it has on all sorts of businesses--that also applies to our Nation's financial institutions.

It's through our banks and credit unions that so many of our small businesses get off the ground, and that's how, oftentimes, they're able to sustain themselves during dips in the economy. Unfortunately, there is great uncertainty in the financial sector as well. We can cite a number of different things, but I put Dodd-Frank high on the list. I certainly hear that in my district. Let me relate to you a little story about the impact of regulations as they affect banks and how they, in turn, affect businesses in my district and around the country.

I visited, not long ago, a business that manufactures food products, things like these little miniature pizzas that are frozen--you buy them at the grocery store--and little hot dogs with dough encrusted around them. It's actually an incredibly productive manufacturer of these things, and it has developed a lot of expertise. This company was on the verge of a major expansion. It would have created hundreds of jobs in my district and led to additional jobs because of the supply industry that would have supported this company.

But Federal regulations got in the way.

The company needed a $3 million bridge loan to get everything online and begin production. They were a dream sort of business. To give you a sense of what they had lined up, they had a world-renowned entrepreneur, and they had a billionaire investor. The person who had conceived of this business put up $1 million of his own money--his life savings. They had several high-profile, nationally known businesses lining up with purchase orders. They'd already secured a new facility and invested significantly in new capital equipment.

So everything is online, but the new banking regulations prohibited them from getting the money they needed to take it to the next level. Things are finally moving forward for this business. I'm happy to say that, despite these headwinds, the founder of this business was able to secure alternative financing from private sources and others. Ultimately, it was regulations that almost killed these hundreds of jobs in my district.

This is the sort of human impact that so many Americans and communities are facing right now. This is what we're trying to get our hands on with this legislation that we're passing.

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Mr. YOUNG of Indiana. Absolutely.

So we've seen this in the ag sector, where traditionally between crops being planted and harvested, it's not uncommon to get bank loans to keep the operation afloat, especially with smaller farms. We see it in all types of businesses. It's time that we take care of these financial regulations and other types of regulations, and I'm glad we are acting here on the Republican side in the House of Representatives.

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Mr. YOUNG of Indiana. We've just lost all sense of perspective. We ought to be measuring the cost of any given regulation--of any proposed regulation--of the benefits, and then comparing the two. I think any fair-minded person would take into account both of them and, in the end, decide whether or not a given regulation makes sense.

I was doing a little research earlier in preparation of my coming down to the floor. I just wanted to see what some of the cost-benefit analyses have been for recent regulations.

I came across a report by the National Bureau of Economic Research. It was from a decade ago. They took a look at some of the regulations that have been proposed over the years. One of them was child-safe lighters. The Consumer Product Safety Commission determined that a life would be saved for a cost of only $100,000 by implementing these regulatory standards for child-safe lighters. That strikes me as pretty reasonable. That's absolutely worth it. There was another regulation proposed, and conceivably for a cost of $100 trillion that we might save a life some day by the solid waste construction regulatory standards that our Federal Government has proposed. There has got to be a sense of balance here, or we're going to crush our economy.

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Mr. YOUNG of Indiana. If I can intervene here. You would think that during a down economy, what some have called the worst economy since the Great Depression, we would stop piling on. It's the first rule of holes: you stop digging when you find yourself in one. But we continue to dig even though we're in a hole. We pile on new significant regulations on top of the existing significant regulations.

There's a portion of this legislation that was offered originally by Congressman Griffin. His name is still on it: Regulatory Freeze for Jobs Act. This places a moratorium on all significant regulations, all of those with $100 million or more economic cost on our economy.

This is common sense among my constituents, probably among the vast majority of the American people here, that you just stop piling on the major regulations during a down economy. I'm certainly supportive of this. I think we need to go further.

Mr. Tipton of Colorado mentioned the REINS Act. It would be my preference that every time we have any proposed rule or regulation imposing a $100 million cost or more on our economy, it comes back to Congress for a hearing, for an up-or-down vote. We should allow our constituents to weigh in on the manner, tell us how to improve the regulation, tell us if they think it ought to be eliminated altogether, or perhaps they like it. In the end, I think we need to own these significant regulations.

You know what? If we pass that REINS Act, that will give all of us an incentive not to punt on the hard issues, not to pass them onto the EPAs and OSHAs and USDAs of the world. Ultimately, we would own it. We would be accountable. I would invite that sort of scrutiny and accountability.

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Mr. YOUNG of Indiana. Just one addition to the gentlelady's comments. The President also ordered a regulatory review of all regulations in that very same speech. And he was going to root out, he said, existing regulations that were constraining job creation. He reaffirmed his commitment to repealing all these sorts of measures. You know, his rhetoric is not matched by commitment, by action. So we're acting in terms of this piece of legislation, and I am proud of that.

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Mr. YOUNG of Indiana. I have heard that. It seems he has other priorities. But we need to force the hand. We need to make the argument here. This is what our constituents are asking us to do, every conceivable thing we can think of to create an environment where jobs can be created, where new businesses can be started, where entrepreneurship is at a 15-year low, where existing businesses can expand, where unemployment remains above 8 percent for how many months now.

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