[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 12]
[Senate]
[Pages 17355-17356]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS

  Mr. REID. Madam President, it is impossible to open a newspaper or 
watch cable news these days without hearing my Republican colleagues 
talk about the evils of ``job-killing regulations.'' Each day, they 
arrive on the Senate floor to rail against the safeguards that keep our 
water clean, our air fresh, and our mines safe. According to the GOP, 
these safeguards are actually the source of all this Nation's economic 
woes--these terrible, horrible, time-consuming government regulations 
that hinder the economic progress of America.
  Republicans will have you believe that these commonsense rules that 
check the greed of Wall Street banks, keep huge corporations honest, 
and stop Big Oil's unnecessary risk-taking are also causing small 
businesses great harm. Indeed, that would be a terrible thing if that 
were true. And it isn't.
  While it is proper to guard against and remove onerous regulations--
and we need to do that--my Republican friends have yet to produce a 
single shred of evidence that the regulations they hate so much do the 
broad economic harms they claim. That is because there isn't any.
  Conversely, there is plenty of evidence to prove those regulations 
save lives, prevent asthma attacks, and ensure that mom-and-pops face a 
fair fight against these multinational corporations and moneyed 
interest groups. There is plenty of evidence to prove that disasters 
such as the BP oilspill and the financial crisis of 2008 could have 
been prevented by better, stronger government watchdog regulations.
  But Republicans aren't relying on evidence as they propagate the myth 
of the job-killing regulations; they are relying on repetition. There 
are many people, but let's just take one--Bruce Bartlett, an adviser to 
President Ronald Reagan, a Treasury official under

[[Page 17356]]

President George H.W. Bush, and a trusted conservative voice on 
economics. I had many to choose from, but I chose this one to talk a 
little bit about today. He offered a number of strong words on the 
regulation monster under big business's bed:

       No hard evidence is offered for this claim: It is simply 
     asserted as self-evident and repeated endlessly throughout 
     the conservative echo chamber . . . In my opinion, regulatory 
     uncertainty is a canard invented by Republicans that allows 
     them to use current economic problems to pursue an agenda 
     supported by the business community year in and year out. In 
     other words, it is a simple case of political opportunism, 
     not a serious effort to deal with high unemployment.

  Listen to what he said again because it is worth repeating.

       No hard evidence is offered for this claim: It is simply 
     asserted as self-evident and repeated endlessly throughout 
     the conservative echo chamber . . . In my opinion, regulatory 
     uncertainty is a canard invented by Republicans that allows 
     them to use current economic problems to pursue an agenda 
     supported by the business community year in and year out. In 
     other words, it is a simple case of political opportunism, 
     not a serious effort to deal with high unemployment.

  But why use regulations proven to protect the health of every mom, 
dad, man, woman, and child in this Nation as a scapegoat? What are the 
origins of this myth?
  I believe, as Bartlett does, that Republicans are attacking 
regulation because they don't have a plan to create jobs and turn our 
economy around--no plan. While Democrats have been pushing time-tested 
remedies for a flagging economy, such as infrastructure investments or 
middle-class tax cuts, Republican colleagues have been peddling a cure-
all tonic of deregulation.
  Bartlett says:

       People are increasingly concerned about unemployment, but 
     Republicans have nothing to offer them.

  They have offered up the spectre of overreaching government 
regulation to distract from the fact that they haven't offered a single 
idea for how to put America back to work. They use the argument to 
justify rolling back everything from clean air and water safeguards to 
Wall Street and health insurance industry reforms. We voted on a number 
of those last week.
  What is more, they spread the tall tale that removing these 
regulations and letting big business do exactly as it pleases will not 
only prevent job losses but actually create new jobs. Bartlett called 
that logical leap ``nonsense. It's just made up.''
  So let's talk fact, not fiction. According to the Bureau of Labor 
Statistics, which asked executives why they downsized, only a tiny, 
tiny fraction of layoffs had anything to do with tighter regulation. 
Last year, only three-tenths of 1 percent of people who lost their jobs 
were let go principally because of government regulations or government 
intervention. On the other hand, 25 percent of them were laid off 
because of no business, lack of business. In a recent survey by the 
Small Business Majority, only 13 percent of small businesses cited 
regulation as their biggest concern. Half said economic uncertainty was 
the greatest challenge they had.
  That is why Democrats have been offering real solutions to our job 
crisis and policies that help small firms hire, grow, and thrive again. 
The truth is, we have enough to worry about in these tough economic 
times. We can't allow the myth to distract us from the real crisis of 
high unemployment facing this great Nation.

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