[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 13]
[House]
[Pages 18476-18480]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1830
     GOP FRESHMEN HOUR: THE IMPORTANCE OF SMALL BUSINESS IN AMERICA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Marino). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 5, 2011, the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Mrs. 
Ellmers) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority 
leader.


                             General Leave

  Mrs. ELLMERS. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members 
have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and insert 
extraneous material on the topic of this Special Order.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the 
gentlewoman from North Carolina?
  There was no objection.
  Mrs. ELLMERS. Mr. Speaker, I am here tonight with my colleagues to 
discuss the importance of small business in America.
  Small businesses are our job creators in America, and we here in 
Congress must do everything that we can to help them to be doing 
exactly that in creating jobs in our country.
  We're here to talk about these issues. We're here to talk about the 
burdens that are on small business that remain intact that we can help 
with. We must do everything we can because right now our small business 
hands are tied. They are telling us over and over again that 
regulations and the threat of taxation uncertainty continue to hold 
them back from creating jobs, innovating, and investing in their own 
companies.
  With that, I yield to my colleague from Washington.
  Ms. HERRERA BEUTLER. I thank the gentlelady for allowing me the time 
to join her here today to talk about what this government can and 
should be doing to help the private sector grow jobs. That's what we're 
about. We want to help small businesses grow jobs.
  This is a statistic most of us are familiar with. Close to two-thirds 
of all new jobs come from small businesses. They are truly the backbone 
of our economy. So what if this government started by saying, What can 
we do to help you, not hurt you or impede your success?
  And that's what this Congress is going to be doing this week as we 
consider the Regulatory Flexibility Act, H.R. 527. It's a bill that 
strengthens existing law. It simply says a Federal rule is killing jobs 
if a Federal agency is then required to find a rule that's less 
burdensome. It's pretty cut and dried. It's something we should be 
doing already, but we actually have to pass a bill to require it.
  When the Federal agencies here in Washington, DC, issue one rule 
after another, small businesses pay the price and our economy loses 
jobs.
  For instance, take Somarakis Vacuum Pumps in my neck of the woods in 
southwest Washington, a business manufacturer. When I visit this 
business, I see a thriving facility with people at work. They're 
assembling products that help our economy grow. But Somarakis Vacuum 
Pumps doesn't have a huge team of lawyers and business accountants to 
handle the regulatory details. They actually need regulatory 
specialists to navigate the maze of Federal rules. They don't have the 
money; but, you know, they just might need it.
  I actually brought the reason why I think they might need that. Mr. 
Speaker, this is pretty heavy. This is actually the list of Federal 
rules and regulations just for half of November. This doesn't even 
represent the entire month. These books I have right here represent 
about 2 weeks' worth of Federal regulations and rules that Somarakis 
Vacuum Pumps has to navigate.
  Let me show you, if I may, just the rules from the last 3 days--
Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday--right here.
  You know, part of the reason we're here today is to illustrate the 
need to make it simpler and easier for small businesses to navigate 
this Federal maze. I mean, this is ridiculous. This is Monday, this is 
Tuesday, and this is Wednesday. Three days' worth of rules that 
Somarakis Vacuum Pumps in southwest Washington is going to need help 
navigating.
  It shouldn't be this way, Mr. Speaker, which is why this week we're 
working very hard, and we're going to pass a bill that says if these 
rules and burdens--it puts the proof and the burden back on the 
government. If these rules are too burdensome, the Federal Government 
needs to find a better way to put forward its regulations.
  Another rule that's really important is working its way through the 
Environmental Protection Agency and the courts. It's called the Forest 
Roads Rule. It's also very impactful to southwest Washington. It's 
crippling in that it overturns 35 years of environmental policy and 
would require a Federal permit on every single forest road. In essence, 
you have to get the same Federal permit for a road through your 
privately owned forestland that you would have to get for factories and 
industrial sites. That's not necessary.
  Let's consider the impacts on public land. According to the U.S. 
Forest Service, it would require that agency alone 10 years to obtain 
the 400,000 permits necessary for the roads on public lands. What would 
that do to Rick Dunning, who owns a small tree farm in Clark County, 
Washington? He's not the U.S. Forest Service. He doesn't have unlimited 
lawyers and resources. He has to do this on his own.
  That's what we're here tonight to do is to make it easier on these 
small business owners to operate in our regions and grow our economy.
  With that, I thank the gentlelady for the time to talk about my 
support for the Regulatory Flexibility Act and for what we're doing to 
help grow jobs in small businesses.
  Mrs. ELLMERS. I will just echo my colleague's remarks by saying that, 
according to the NFIB, compliance with environmental regulations costs 
small businesses four times more than larger firms. Larger firms do 
have the ability

[[Page 18477]]

and employees in place to deal with these issues. Our small businesses 
simply cannot afford to do business that way.
  With that, I yield to my colleague from California.
  Mr. DENHAM. Thank you for your leadership on this area.
  I rise in support of H.R. 527. We can't afford any more of the 
overregulation. Regulatory burdens from new rules just this year alone 
have cost American taxpayers $93.2 billion. One study found that each 
$1 million increase in the Federal regulatory budget costs 420 jobs. 
Overregulation costs us jobs around the Nation.
  Let me just speak from my own perspective.
  Twelve years ago, I started Denham Plastics, something that my wife 
and I borrowed an incredible amount of money to start a vision that we 
had supporting the agriculture industry with a plastics company. It has 
been a tough road to hoe as a small business owner. It certainly comes 
at great risk to our family, but it was a vision that we had, that we 
believed, that without any government intervention we can succeed in 
not only creating new customers but new jobs.
  But one regulation would have put us out of business--the government-
run health care. Just the 1099 provision alone, by having to report all 
of our customers, by having to report all of our suppliers, would have 
put our small business under.
  From an agriculture perspective--I'm a farmer in the central valley. 
The EPA came down with new dust control regulations.
  Now, we farm. We drive tractors. We till our land, and we're going to 
have dust. I mean, just by the sheer motion of a tractor driving 
through a field or plowing through the dirt--it's something that we've 
done through the history of our Nation--creates dust. But are you going 
to put us out of business because of it?
  We grow almonds. You can't spray the trees full of water before you 
shake the trees and harvest the almonds. You're going to have dust.
  So I've been a coauthor of a bill that gets rid of this burdensome 
regulation, something that would shut down our agriculture industry, 
not only in the central valley of California but across the Nation. 
We're farmers. We are going to have dust.
  Some of my fellow farmers and ranchers are also aware that EPA also 
wanted to expand its regulation of manure as a threat of greenhouse 
gas. I mean, some of these things are so ludicrous that they just cost 
us millions of jobs, and the threat alone causes farmers to say, Do we 
really want to be in this business? Do our kids really want to take 
over the family farm?
  We've got to stop this overregulation because it does cost us jobs. 
We've got to stop eliminating jobs before we can actually go out and 
create more jobs. We have to have certainty in the marketplace. And 
whether you're a farmer or a small business owner, the regulations 
affect us in such a way that, as a small business owner, I couldn't go 
out there and hire a lobbyist to go through the 90,000 pages of new 
regulations this year alone.

                              {time}  1840

  We have to stop the regulations that are killing businesses 
throughout the Nation. H.R. 527 is one way to do that. We need 
flexibility. Most of all, we need certainty. We've got to be able to 
plan our businesses, not for a month, not for 2 months, not for 1 year. 
When you're in business, when you're out there borrowing capital, when 
you're putting your home into a second mortgage because you want to 
have the American Dream and create a business and want to go out and 
hire new people, you have to have some certainty. I can't go to my wife 
and say, Let's take a second out on our home, and maybe we might make 
it next year.
  With regulations, we don't know what's going to happen. We need to be 
able to plan for 5 years, 10 years. We need to be able to plan on 
putting our kids through college. Before I go out and hire a new 
employee, I need to make a commitment to that employee that we're going 
to have ongoing employment, and I need to make a commitment to that 
employee's entire family, who depends on us for that new job.
  So the regulations that are killing our businesses across the Nation 
have to end. We need flexibility. We need certainty as a business. We 
need it in order to create jobs in this great Nation.
  Mrs. ELLMERS. I thank my colleague from California. Your perspective 
alone, as a small business owner and as a farmer, really gives us that 
strong idea of what we're really facing.
  Many of us here in Washington now are and have been small business 
owners, and we understand the burdens that we are having to undertake 
and that the rest of America is dealing with. In fact, Mr. Speaker, I'm 
going to just talk a little bit about some statistics and poll data.
  According to a recent Gallup Poll, small business owners in the 
United States say complying with government regulations is the most 
important problem facing them today, followed by consumer confidence in 
the economy and a lack of consumer demand. Small business firms bear a 
regulatory cost of $10,585 per employee just to deal with the 
regulations, which is 36 percent higher, there again, than larger 
businesses. Small business is what drives our economy, yet it is what 
is continuously targeted, and we must act on it with the bill that we 
will pass tomorrow, H.R. 527.
  I spoke a little bit about the excessive costs of dealing with 
environmental regulations. According to the Small Business 
Administration, regulations cost the American economy $1.7 trillion 
annually, which is an enormous cost. You can see by our unemployment 
rate why we continue in this. Until we are able to cut the excessive, 
overbearing regulations that are facing our businesses, we will not 
turn this economy around. That is why we must act now. That is why, of 
the many bills we have passed over to the Senate, we repeatedly ask for 
a vote so that we can get started. We could do this tomorrow if these 
bills were voted on.
  One last bit of information before I introduce my next colleague.
  Of the administration's new regulations--``new'' regulations--200 are 
expected to cost over $100 million each. Seven of those new regulations 
will cost the economy more than $1 billion each. We cannot continue on 
this path.
  With that, I yield to my colleague from Illinois.
  Mr. SCHILLING. I thank the gentlewoman from North Carolina for 
inviting me to participate today.
  The best thing about having the opportunity to represent the 
residents of Illinois' 17th District is the ability to just listen to 
their concerns and then taking those concerns back here to Washington, 
D.C.
  As I travel throughout the area, I listen, and I am also asked what 
worries me. I worry about unemployment and about the uncertainty facing 
our families in our district. I am worried that more is not being done 
to create an environment of certainty that promotes long-term growth in 
our jobs sector.
  Government does not create jobs. We need to be clear about that. 
Government creates an environment for job creation by the private 
sector. Folks simply will not be put back to work if government 
continues villainizing our job creators and enacting policies that keep 
workers on the unemployment lines and drive us deeper into debt. As a 
small business owner myself, I understand how this hinders the ability 
to create jobs.
  Back in August, I invited local business owners throughout our area 
to participate in a business roundtable where we discussed what 
government can do to empower the private sector, spur job creation, and 
grow our economy. These business owners are the people we are asking to 
lead us into economic recovery and to put Americans back to work.
  I was pleased to see folks from all sorts of industries present eager 
and great ideas and thoughts on issues that basically are causing them 
to struggle in this economy. They shared with me that the high energy 
costs, rising taxes, mixed messages from Washington, D.C., and the 
uncertainty from

[[Page 18478]]

the Illinois State government are stifling the creation of an 
environment of economic success.
  Now, there are more than 27 million small businesses throughout the 
United States of America. They are the lifeblood of our Nation's 
economy. America's small businesses create 7 out of every 10 new jobs, 
and they employ over half the country's private-sector workforce. We 
ought to be making it easier for these folks to grow and hire new 
workers, not villainizing them or burdening them with a broken Tax 
Code, unnecessary mandates, high energy costs, and uncertainty. We need 
to tear down the roadblocks, get government out of the way and lay the 
groundwork for real private-sector job creation.
  Phil Nelson, president of the Illinois Farm Bureau, recently 
testified before the Small Business Committee.
  He said, ``What really keeps me lying awake at night is the potential 
for more regulatory creep. It's as if we go to bed one night with one 
set of regulations and wake up the next morning facing a new set. Every 
moment that we spend fighting and then working to comply with needless, 
duplicative regulations takes us away from what we do best--producing 
food.''
  My colleagues and I in the House have been focused on jobs since day 
one--passing more than 20 jobs bills to give small businesses the 
certainty they need to grow, increasing the domestic production of oil 
and getting Americans back to work. Unfortunately, these bills remain 
stuck in the Senate, but we cannot do it alone. The President and the 
Senate Democrats must join us.
  This week, we will be voting on H.R. 527, the Regulatory Flexibility 
Improvements Act. This is yet another pro-jobs bill, one that helps 
address the problem of burdensome, reckless regulations that burden 
businesses and stunt job growth. The Regulatory Flexibility 
Improvements Act provides urgently needed help to small businesses 
facing an onslaught of Federal regulations. When considering 
regulations, agencies frequently fail to consider alternative ways to 
achieve the regulatory goals without imposing unnecessary burdens on 
America's job creators. This bill increases the ability of small 
businesses to provide input to Federal agencies as they consider 
government regulations, and it gives the Small Business Administration 
new authority to ensure agencies comply with a law that requires 
flexibility in taking regulatory action against small business.
  It takes President Obama's regulatory review Executive order one step 
further, giving the Small Business Administration the ability to ensure 
new regulations are in compliance with the law while verifying that 
small businesses will be able to comply without hurting their ability 
to create jobs.
  Business owners need the certainty that government will get out of 
the way so that they can do what they do best, which is to grow their 
businesses and create jobs, and the American people need real 
bipartisan solutions to our jobs crisis.
  Let's put politics and partisanship aside and help the private sector 
create the jobs that Americans throughout the country so desperately 
need. The time has come to empower small businesses and to reduce 
government barriers by helping our small businesses, by fixing the Tax 
Code to help our job creators, by boosting competitiveness for American 
manufacturers, by encouraging entrepreneurship and growth, by 
maximizing American energy production, by paying down America's 
unsustainable debt burden, and by starting to live within our means.
  Mrs. ELLMERS. I thank my colleague from Illinois for that very 
important information.
  Again, as a small business owner, this information is vital to the 
solutions that we're coming up with here in Washington. We're not just 
Members of Congress who don't have the experience out there, and we 
aren't just listening to the usual Washington bureaucrats.

                              {time}  1850

  We are actually small business owners who deal with these real-life 
experiences and understand what works and what doesn't, and this simply 
is not working.
  Mr. Speaker, in my district, where the unemployment rate hovers at 
about 10.3 percent, I am hearing numerous stories highlighting how 
small businesses are ``hanging on by a thread,'' and I say that in 
quotes. ``Hanging on by a thread'' is what I hear. ``Over-regulation is 
killing us,'' is another quote I hear over and over and over again.
  They feel that they are being punished by Washington. They, years 
ago, felt that their competitors were the ones that they were working 
against and trying to compete with for a better product. Now they feel 
that they are working against the Federal Government and the Federal 
Government is working against them. The Federal Government has become 
their enemy.
  One of the local small businesses in my district is Kivett's 
Incorporated in Clinton, North Carolina, owned and operated by Mr. 
Jerol and Telia Kivett. They are wonderful people, and I met them when 
I was actually running for office. Why? Because I needed to go in. They 
called for a meeting with me because they were so concerned with where 
our country was going and what was happening to their business.
  They were not people who had been politically active, they were not 
people who had ever sat down with a Member of Congress or a want-to-be 
Member of Congress, but they felt trapped and continue to feel trapped 
by the government regulations and all of the uncertainty, including the 
President's health care bill, which they know will harm them greatly.
  Kivett's Incorporated, is the largest family-owned and operated 
church pew manufacturer and pew refinisher in the United States. In 
addition, they build and refurbish other church furniture and fixtures, 
such as steeples and stained glass windows and provide a full range of 
services from delivery to installation.
  This is a jewel in my district. So many are sending these jobs over 
to China, and yet the Kivetts have maintained their business. Their 
business was started by Jerol's father, I believe, back in the fifties. 
They have spent their lives and dedicated their lives to their 
business, and they are feeling that it is being pulled out from 
underneath them.
  Mr. Kivett's company had 160 employees in 2005, and they are now down 
to 52--from 160 to 52. Their volume of business is down 60 percent. 
Their business has not made a profit in the last 3 years. That is 
significant. They have not increased the prices on their products 
either since 2005.
  This has been due to the fear of losing more business, even though 
their costs, their costs for products, have escalated; but they have 
tried to maintain their business by keeping their prices at the same 
level. At one point they were averaging one church, church furniture 
for one church every day, and are now down to approximately two per 
week.
  Mr. Speaker, how are they going to be able to keep their doors open 
and keep those 52 remaining employees working? Churches depend on 
charitable giving, and they are having a hard time finding a way to 
meet their operating budget, which leaves any kind of future planning 
completely out of the realm of possibility.
  I spoke a moment ago about the health care law, the uncertainty it's 
creating for small businesses. Owners make it harder for us to 
determine--and this is coming straight from Mr. Kivett--it is making it 
harder for us to determine what our costs are at a time when we are 
struggling to meet the most basic cost of running our business.
  As Mr. Kivett puts it, we are just trying to maintain and praying for 
the government to stop attempting to regulate small businesses and 
``get out of the way.'' That is another quote I hear over and over and 
over again: ``Get out of the way.''
  That's some of the gloom and doom that my business owners in my 
district are faced with. As you heard tonight from some of my 
colleagues, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Mr. Schilling 
from Illinois showed you the card, the number of bills, again, that

[[Page 18479]]

we have passed in the House with bipartisan support to create jobs.
  We keep hearing how America wants jobs. We keep hearing about the 99. 
The 99 percent is sitting on the floor of the majority leader in the 
Senate, because if those bills were passed and sent to the President to 
be signed into law, we could have jobs created in this country. We need 
to decrease the unemployment rate.
  We can talk about cutting spending all day long, and we are all about 
that, but until we get people back to work, we're not going to turn 
this economy around. Again, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, 
and you have heard us speak tonight about H.R. 527, which we will be 
voting on tomorrow.
  We simply cannot continue the one-size-fits-all regulations produced 
by this administration which hinder our small businesses. This bill 
will help alleviate needless burdens. Economic recovery begins with our 
small businesses, but this will not happen unless we rein in the mass 
of regulations coming from right here in Washington.
  The Regulatory Flexibility Act of 1980, as amended by the Small 
Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act, requires Federal agencies 
to assess the economic impact of their regulations on small business. 
Imagine that, imagine having to run an economic impact study to find 
out how much damage they will be doing to small businesses if these 
regulations are put in place.
  If the impact is significant, they must consider alternatives that 
are less burdensome. However, the agencies have used loopholes to get 
around this statute, and that is why it is so important that we pass 
H.R. 527, the Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act of 2011, which 
would remove the loopholes and strengthen the flexibility act by 
increasing the power of the office of the chief counsel for advocacy to 
enforce the RFA, ensuring complete analysis of potential impacts on 
small business and forcing agencies to perform better periodic review 
of rules.
  Regulations often impose unnecessary burdens on small business. 
You've heard that over and over and over again tonight, that impede 
their ability to create jobs. Agencies frequently fail to consider 
appropriate alternatives that allow agencies to achieve their 
regulatory objectives without imposing burdens on America's job 
creators, our small business owners.
  The Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act, H.R. 527, provides 
urgently needed help to small businesses facing an onslaught of Federal 
regulations. It has been 15 years since Congress last updated the 
Regulatory Flexibility Act of 1980. During that time, we have seen that 
there are weaknesses in the regulatory process that Federal agencies 
have exploited to the detriment of small businesses and job creators.
  This bill ensures Federal agencies can no longer ignore the RFA. Job 
creators are the key to economic recovery and the small businesses are 
America's job creators. Over-regulation requires the diversion of 
scarce capital from job creation to regulatory compliance.
  I said earlier, Mr. Speaker, North Carolina's unemployment rate is 
now 10.4 percent. This is not a statistic; this is a catastrophe.
  Mr. Speaker, thank you so much for this opportunity tonight.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Will the gentlelady yield?
  Mrs. ELLMERS. I yield to my colleague from Iowa.

                              {time}  1900

  Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentlelady from North Carolina for 
yielding, and I especially thank her for leading in this Special Order 
hour here tonight to discuss the burden of regulation on business in 
this country, primarily the burden on small businesses in America.
  From my standpoint and my background, I started a business in 1975. I 
remember the fears I had at the time. I knew I could do the work and I 
knew I could line up the customers. I believed I could turn a cash 
flow, but I didn't know that I could comply with all government 
regulations. And little did I know how much I was actually stepping 
into.
  When you begin to enter into a business, you are stepping into the 
unknown. That unknown turned out to be that I would find out about a 
government agent after a government agent, one after another. They 
would show up. They'd send me a little mailer. They would talk to 
someone else in my business. They would say: Did you meet this one? Did 
you meet that regulation? Do you have your MSD requirements there? What 
about the EPA side of this? Do you know you have to post a sign that 
says that you're an equal opportunity employer. And by the way, that 
has to be in multiple languages. And in case someone shows up that 
doesn't speak that language, you may have another regulation to provide 
that interpreter that's there.
  On and on and on it went. More and more of my time went away from 
producing goods and services that had a marketable value, and instead 
it was invested in complying with primarily Federal but also State 
regulations.
  So as the years went by, I got better at it. I found out more and 
more to comply with, and I got greater and greater frustration within 
me because of this burden of filing reports, meeting deadlines, and 
making sure that the government bureaucrats had all of their 
regulations and all of the paperwork that they wanted, all the while, 
``To what purpose?'' was my question, because much of that paperwork 
that I was filling out was going off in some storage dungeon somewhere 
never to be seen again unless there was some type of litigation or 
regulation enforcement against me, in which case then I was confident 
that they would go dig it up out of the dungeon and pull up that 
paperwork to see if I dotted the i's and crossed the t's. But what good 
did it do? What good did most of that regulation do if it simply was 
going to go off somewhere to go into storage so if, God forbid we had 
an accident on the job site and OSHA would come in, they would want to 
make sure that I had all of my regulations in place? But that wouldn't 
make us more safe, the paperwork would not.
  I made a comment here in the Judiciary Committee a month or so ago 
that of all of these regulations that we have to comply with, if you 
look across America, there are some really good companies in this 
country. Of all of them, thousands and thousands of companies in 
America, hundreds of thousands--actually, millions of companies in 
America altogether. They advertise everything under the sun that you 
can imagine. They have banners on their Web site. They will tell you 
that they are the best or first at--you name anything it is you want. 
Put it in the Google search. You'll find an American company that will 
provide it for you, and they'll advertise their quality. They'll 
advertise their personnel. They'll advertise the efficiency and the 
cost. It will go on and on and on. But there isn't a single company in 
America, not one, Mr. Speaker, that has a little banner on their Web 
site that says, ``We are in compliance with all Federal regulations.'' 
Not one single company takes that position, and I'll tell you why: 
because they know if they ever advertise that they are in compliance, 
there would be a Federal bureaucrat that represented an agency, or two 
or more, or up to 682, according to the Constitution Daily Web site, 
Federal agencies--and those are subdepartments and divisions, 
regulatory entities, 682 of them, and this count is about 5 years old, 
by the way--that can levy sanction actions against American businesses.
  And so the number one fear I had was: Can I comply with all of these 
regulations? Can I identify them? Can I comply with them? And what do I 
do about the conflicting regulations where, if you meet one regulation, 
the other regulation contradicts it? You're bound to be in violation.
  So today there isn't a single company in America that advertises that 
they are in compliance with all Federal regulations. And if they did, I 
think we should give them the Doo Dah of the Year Award for that 
because they would be surrounded by bureaucrats, Federal regulators 
that are in there to inspect, to make sure that they are completely in 
compliance.
  And, by the way, they have to justify their job. So I would predict 
that any company that would announce that

[[Page 18480]]

they are in compliance with all Federal regulations probably wouldn't 
survive beyond about 18 months before they went into bankruptcy because 
they would be tied up in knots and tied down and they couldn't produce 
those goods and services that have a marketable value.
  Now, there is a tradeoff on this always, and it doesn't mean that we 
should not have wise regulations. Yes, we should. But they need to keep 
in mind the regulatory burden of those rules and what it does to slow 
down production.
  Now, I've said goods and services that have a marketable valuable 
both domestically and abroad. That means, if you run a company, you 
want to go to work every day, and you look around, what do we do? We 
produce a product. We manufacture and market a widget. And you want to 
do that as efficiently as possible. So if you put 100 people out there 
on the factory floor to manufacture widgets, and it doesn't take but 
one person to run payroll and answer mail, you're in pretty good shape. 
You've got one of those 100 people that's tied up doing administrative 
duties, that's pretty good efficiency. That's 99 percent producing that 
product, that number one, grade A widget that you're manufacturing and 
perhaps invented.
  But as soon as a bureaucrat comes along and says, Wait a minute. You 
have to have somebody here that's documenting--let's say the water 
that's coming in, the electricity that's coming in, the sewage that's 
going out. You have to have safety inspectors and you have to have 
safety meetings, so that once a week you line everybody up and spend 15 
to 30 minutes telling them what they need to do, which is safe. Not a 
bad idea, but when the government calls for that, they put more on your 
overhead and they've shut down the production of that entire plant for 
that period of time that they prescribe.
  And the other regulations that come along in our construction 
businesses, the Federal Government saying, let's see, you have to pay 
the Federal Government scale for your equipment operators on 
construction projects, Davis-Bacon wage scale. That really means union-
imposed scale on those projects. And it might change the wages. In the 
past, I've seen them double or be cut in half, depending which 
direction you're going. Just going across the highway, you go into a 
different division and it's a whole different wage scale. The guy 
running the shovel gets a different wage than the guy that's running 
the grease gun, different from the guy that's running the machine 
that's being greased or having the track scooped out on it. And I have 
to keep track of all of that and do what the government tells me, which 
means not just is it costly to keep track of it all, but it consumes 
the efficiency on the project. It makes it difficult, if not 
impossible.
  Mrs. ELLMERS. I thank the gentleman from Iowa.
  Mr. Speaker, I just want to take the opportunity to say in closing 
that, as a small business owner with my husband back in Dunn, North 
Carolina, with our surgical practice, that we have faced exactly what 
my colleague is talking about, these excessive regulations that have 
continued through the years.
  We are at a point now where we are seeing our fellow colleagues back 
home with medical practices closing their doors, being bought out by 
hospitals because they just cannot and know they will not be able to 
adhere to the mandates coming forward with the health care bill and all 
of the uncertainty with the doc fix, SGR, all of those wonderful 
things.
  Mr. Speaker, we must act now. We can turn this economy around by 
acting on these regulations, by passing these regulatory decreases for 
our businesses so that, there again, our job creators can do what they 
do best, reinvesting in this country and being the job creators that 
they are.
  With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

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