[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 9]
[House]
[Pages 13074-13078]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        REGULATIONS AND JOB LOSS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Carter) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. CARTER. Mr. Speaker, we've all been back in our districts for the 
last month, and we've been talking to friends and neighbors back home 
about what America is truly concerned with, what is most important in 
the eyes of all Americans, and that is getting America back to work.
  Our economy is stagnant. This administration is throwing up barriers, 
which is freezing assets because the folks that normally would invest 
in growth and hiring people are frightened about what's around the next 
corner, and they're sitting with all their money and they're not 
growing.
  I met this morning with around somewhere between 12 and 14 of my 
neighbors in just a sit-down cup of coffee, where we sat around and we 
talked about the way that folks in central Texas view what's going on 
with the job market.
  You know, in Texas we've been blessed. We haven't faced the kinds of 
unemployment numbers that other States have had. But we now are 
certainly seeing unemployment creeping up in our State also.
  We had small businessmen and -women there, and they talked about the 
things that concern them. But yet we've had meetings with bankers 
who've explained to us that you can look at their deposits and see that 
American local investors are sitting on the sidelines and keeping their 
deposits in the bank and not investing in growth and not investing in 
capital structure, not building buildings, and certainly not hiring 
people. And so part of the discussion this morning from some very 
intelligent small business folks was, we think we know why; why do you 
say this is happening?
  The answers I got were answers that we hear on the floor of this 
House every day.
  But the one that I've been talking about now for almost a year, 
probably maybe even over a year, is the fact that we are seeing the 
administration doing through government regulations, which are 
basically laws passed by the regulators which change the playing field 
for people and our economy across the board at every level. It's not 
done by acts of this Congress. It's done by acts of bureaucrats in the 
Obama administration as they make rules and regulations that fit their 
view of the world and how they think the world should work. And these 
regulations regulate the drivers, the force builders that employ the 
American people.
  Many of these regulations have become such a shock to the conscience 
of people who are in business that they say, ``My Lord, I'm not about 
to get invested in growth until I know whether I'm going to even have 
my business once the regulators are through with me.''
  And then sitting on the sideline is the giant regulator program, 
which is the health care bill that this House passed last year and the 
Senate passed. We call it ObamaCare. Its 2,000 pages are multiplying 
very rapidly as the regulators, the people who are able to pass rules 
to set up the regulations that govern that bill, are imposing more and 
more burden on the individual employer and on those people seeking 
health care.
  So what I heard today from some people who are presidents of small 
businesses, run small businesses--a Thomas Barrett, a very intelligent 
lawyer who is both a financial adviser and a lawyer for small and other 
sized businesses all over central Texas and is highly sought after for 
his opinion--they said it's the unknown that's driving the investment 
off the page in the United States. It's the unknown. We don't know 
what's going to happen next. Our taxes. What are taxes going to do? 
We've got taxes that will last for a while and then go back to a 
different tax automatically unless this House acts.
  Then most importantly, and what we talked mostly about today, was all 
the new regulations that are coming up.
  In the next 3 or 4 months, the Republican leadership in this House is 
going to do everything it can to turn back some of the craziness that's 
gone on in the regulatory world. I brought the Members here tonight 
just a few examples of some of the regulations, many of which we've 
been talking about all year. We've spent a lot of time talking about 
the cement industry; we've talked about Boiler MACT; we've talked about 
a lot of other things we're going to talk about tonight.
  But it's just a general outline of some corrective measures that this 
Republican-led House is going to try and going to pass through this 
body to just start slowing down and changing the direction of what we 
think are some ill-conceived regulations by the executive branch, the 
Obama administration.

                              {time}  1950

  I want to start off with this poster right here, which just gives you 
a small example of what we're talking about. In July of this summer--
this is what we've called the ``regulatory summer''--these are 
regulations that have been proposed by various agencies. Many of them 
are household words like the Environmental Protection Agency; but there 
are plenty of others, the Labor Department--you could go on and on.
  In July, 229 proposed regulations went into effect, 379 final 
regulations, and the cost estimated of these proposed and final 
regulations: over $9.5 billion to the economy in the month of July. 
That meant business, the job creators, took a hickey of $9.5 billion in 
1 month, the month of July 2011. We have just finished August--270 
proposed regulations, 347 final regulations: over $8.2 billion in 
August. So for this summer, just July and August, the 2-month total: 
$17.7 billion in costs to the people who create jobs.
  Now, is it any wonder that the people who create jobs are sitting on 
the sidelines and saying, holy cow, how do I hire somebody? And I think 
the American people know why people in business hire somebody. They 
hire somebody because they think that person will make their business 
more prosperous, will make it work more efficiently, will make it do 
the job the business was set up to do. If you are in the roofing 
business and you put roofs on houses, you hire more roofers because you 
think you will be able to produce a better quality product faster and 
more efficiently, therefore enhancing the profit that those who have 
invested their capital and labor into that business--they can make a 
profit so that that business can thrive. You don't hire roofers when 
you don't need to put roofs on houses. I mean, that doesn't make any 
sense, and everybody with any kind of common sense knows that.
  Now, if you've got a person who's got some business, whether it be 
big or small, and they literally don't know what the government is 
going to do to them tomorrow or, let's just say, in the next 2 months, 
following this track record, they could be looking at another almost 
$20 billion worth of additional costs to their business that could be 
coming up in September and October. Based upon the last 2 months, it's 
arguable that it's pretty close to $20 billion of additional costs that 
they were not anticipating and never thought was going to happen to 
them; and all of a sudden out of the clear blue, it drops in their lap.
  Now, you will hear arguments like, wait a minute, there are these 
things that are environmental and other ways

[[Page 13075]]

and people have known all along something about this was going to be 
done. And that may or may not be true. But the ramifications of what 
the regulators actually did are turning out to be horrendous costs to 
industries that right now are trying to get the ground under them 
stable so they can start hiring people again.
  If you're on balancing ground sort of like this earthquake we had up 
here in Washington, which I am very fortunate that I wasn't in, when 
that ground is unstable, you don't know which way to turn. Well, the 
same thing goes for business. When the foundation underneath your 
business is unstable, you don't know which way to turn. Are you going 
to go out and hire somebody, give them a job, when this is what your 
life is right now and someone is creating that problem, that are 
actually by their actions making it unstable?
  I would argue that questionable regulations, the imposition of 
additional costs, the unknown of what taxes are going to be tomorrow--
all these things create an unstable environment for the people who hire 
people. So this last regulatory summer is a perfect example of the 
earthquake that has shaken the foundation of the small businessman and 
the job creators in America.
  The President of the United States promised us, the White House 
promised us, to save $10 billion in redtape, which is kind of the slang 
term for bureaucratic regulations, in 5 years. But the White House has 
put forward $17.7 billion worth of redtape in 2 months. The message has 
been lost somewhere. Where is it? When did what we were promised change 
into a three-for-one worse situation? We were promised a $5 billion 
savings for the job creators; and, in fact, we've created a $17.7 
billion expense and uncertainty to the job creators, and we wonder why 
we are not creating jobs.
  Mr. Kucinich was talking about his view of the world. He and I don't 
see the world the same way, but the facts are when he was talking about 
we need to create jobs, we darn sure need to create jobs.
  The role of the Congress today is finding ways to get this country 
back to work. If we put this country back to work, 90 percent of our 
problems will be much, much better. So the real goal of the Republican 
House this year, to finish this year out, is going to be trying to 
correct at least some of this instability created by these regulators, 
these unelected regulators. These are appointed people, not elected 
people. The heads of these agencies are appointed by the President. 
They are under the wings of the White House, if you will. They are part 
of the executive branch of government. And the legislature, this 
branch, the Congress, is going to, in the next several months, try to 
put some reins on these out-of-control regulators and hold them back. 
And we've got just some of them I am going to talk to you about that 
some of my colleagues are putting forward in the future.
  The week of September 12, which is next week, I suppose, we're going 
to take up the Protecting Jobs from Government Interference Act, by Tim 
Scott of South Carolina. Now, the facts of this situation are very 
unusual in my way of thinking, and I think most of the people in the 
United States, when they heard this on television, they said, they 
can't do that, can they?
  It seems the Boeing Corporation has a big operation up in the 
Washington State area, and they were wanting to build an additional 
plant to build whatever Boeing builds, whether it's aircraft or 
whatever it is--they wanted to do it in South Carolina. They have been 
negotiating and working in good faith with the citizens of South 
Carolina and the government of South Carolina. They have looked at 
alternative locations around the country to make a determination of 
what is best for their business in their situation today, and they 
determined that they were going to build a very important plant in 
South Carolina.

                              {time}  2000

  But the National Labor Relations Board, the NLRB, issued a complaint 
against the Boeing Company for the alleged transfer of an assembly line 
from the Washington plant to South Carolina. Yet not one union employee 
at the Boeing's Puget Sound facility, that's the Washington plant, has 
lost his or her job as a result of the proposed South Carolina plant.
  Still, the NLRB is pursuing a restoration order against Boeing that 
would cost South Carolina thousands of jobs--these are new jobs in 
South Carolina--and deter future investment in the United States. This 
is the government telling Boeing how they can run their business at the 
base level of you can't move unless we tell you you can move; and if 
you choose to go to a right-to-work State instead of a union shop 
State, we're going to tell you, no, you can't do it.
  What happened to the freedom of movement that our Founding Fathers 
created in this country? I mean, part of what makes us great is if you 
can't prosper in Texas, you can maybe prosper in South Dakota. In fact, 
people are right now, as we talk right now, people are taking 
businesses from one part of the country and going to another part of 
the country because of maybe newly discovered resources, maybe a better 
work environment, maybe a more intelligent workforce, maybe a better 
investment community, maybe better opportunities, maybe better tax 
structure. That's the free right of every American, is seeking 
prosperity for their company and for their family to go seek these 
places.
  If we're going to tell Boeing they can't build a plant to create jobs 
in South Carolina, next they may be telling Sam Smith in Oklahoma, I'm 
sorry, but we need you to stay in Oklahoma, we don't want you to move 
to Texas, or we don't want you to move to South Carolina to go to work 
in the Boeing plant, which we just canceled. Is that the kind of world 
we have and we want this government to have? I would say no.
  Do we want the people of South Carolina to have 1,500 new jobs? Yes. 
Is anybody talking about hurting the people employed at Puget Sound? 
No.
  It's the issue of union membership that drove this whole thing, and 
we have given our States the right to choose whether they have a right-
to-work State or they have a union State, and every State in this 
country has some difference in how they view that. It's part of the 
environment that State creates to bring business into the community.
  What in the world is wrong with that, and when did that become Big 
Brother's job to tell somebody where they can and can't offer you a 
job? So are we now saying that the people of Washington State--and I 
have many friends there and I love very much, and I don't mean to be in 
any way defaming Washington State--but we have got a group of 
bureaucrats that are saying those are more important people than the 
people in South Carolina who want to work for Boeing for a good salary, 
because the government's telling them they can't do it.
  The gentleman from South Carolina, Tim Scott, has got this bill, H.R. 
2587, we're going to take it up next week, I understand, which is going 
to protect these jobs from this government interference. It would take 
the common-sense step, and it would prevent that National Labor 
Relations Board from restricting where an employer can create jobs in 
the United States.
  Who would have ever thought we would have had to even address this on 
the floor of this House? This world that we have lived in, and, in 
fact, President John F. Kennedy in writing one of his dissertation 
papers at Harvard came up with a term ``The Great Frontier,'' which the 
whole concept of America was if you failed in one place, the great 
blessing of America is you can pack up and move to another place. At 
one time that was the frontier.
  Now that frontier is in technology; that frontier is in science. That 
frontier is not just moved from one place to the other; it's moved from 
one idea to the other. That's the greatness of America. To have the 
government tell you where you can and can't locate is an abomination to 
the very spirit of the American Dream.

[[Page 13076]]

  This one, we need to do it right away; we are going to do it. We hope 
our friends in the Senate are going to help.
  We have the administration's new Maximum Achievable Technology Act, 
MACT, standards and Cross State Air Pollution, CSAPR, for utility 
plants, will affect electricity prices for nearly all American 
consumers. In total 10,000 power plants are expected to be affected. I 
can't tell you the number in other States, but Texas surprisingly fell 
under this act, which no one anticipated, and we actually had no input 
whatsoever--but that's a different argument which I have made before, 
but I know that we are talking about 17 to 19 plants just in Texas are 
being closed down.
  These are coal-powered plants. We're talking about coal-powered 
plants in most instances here. The result to middle class America is an 
annual electricity bill increase in parts of the country anywhere from 
12 to 24 percent, just by this one regulation that has been proposed 
dealing with coal-powered plants and greenhouse gas emissions. Well, 
Representative John Sullivan of Oklahoma has come up with a solution 
for this, H.R. 2401, the Transparency in Regulatory Analysis of Impacts 
on the Nation.
  One of the things that we think any regulator should be looking at as 
he is doing this type of work is how does this impact the jobs of the 
American people, how does this impact the economy of the area. If you 
have a State that has 20 power plants and the results of your mandatory 
and arbitrary ruling is going to shut down 12 or 15 of those plants, it 
doesn't take a genius to figure the price of electricity is going up.
  Even if they go in and they make a conversion to some other form of 
power at great cost and expense, billions of dollars of additional 
money happen to be spent, even if they do that, you are still going to 
have down time when electricity is going to be scarce and the risk of 
blackouts and brownouts is going to be increased. Quite honestly, it 
hurts every industry and every person that depends on that electricity.
  Has anybody looked into this and said here is how we figure this out 
and told us with transparency what effect this has? No.
  So what Mr. Sullivan is trying to say is that we need to call a time-
out; and it would require a cumulative, economic analysis for specific 
environmental protection rules and specifically delay the final date 
for both utility MACT and CSAPR rules until full impact of the Obama's 
administration regulatory agenda has been studied.
  Some of this stuff is done with computer projections, but the facts 
are it's kind of a shock and surprise to everybody that's in the 
business, and it's time that we call time out and rather than cost this 
country jobs, give these people a chance to continue to have good jobs 
for the American people to work in.
  This is a good bill, and we're going to take this bill up the week of 
September 19.
  The next bill that this Republican Congress is going to go take up is 
H.R. 2250 to deal with what's called boiler MACT. From hospitals to 
factories, colleges, thousands of major American employers use boilers 
that will be impacted by the EPA's new boiler MACT rules.
  These new stringent rules will impose billions of dollars in capital 
and compliance costs, increasing the costs of many goods and services. 
College kids will tell you how expensive going to university is today. 
They don't need any more cost increase there, but it will increase the 
cost of higher education; and it will put over 200,000 jobs at risk, 
just what they have done under the boiler MACT rules.
  So what are we doing with H.R. 2250? Representative Morgan Griffith 
of Virginia has proposed this. It's called the EPA Regulatory Relief 
Act and would provide a legislative stay for four interrelated rules 
issued by the EPA in March of this year. The legislation would also 
provide the EPA with at least 15 months to repropose and finalize new 
achievable rules that do not destroy jobs and provide employers with an 
extended compliance period.
  In other words, if it's a problem, let's fix the problem without 
costing people jobs. Let's fix the problem with a reasonable amount of 
time for compliance so that it's not a knee-jerk reaction that is 
required by everybody to try to keep from going out of business because 
of EPA-imposed rules.

                              {time}  2010

  So basically, just like the last bill we talked about, this is saying 
stop this craziness, take a new look, let the people you're regulating 
have some input into the cost and the compliance and the job loss, and 
then let's restructure. If we've got to fix this problem, restructure 
it in a manner that makes common sense to keep the American men and 
women of this country working, keep the factories open and producing 
and the colleges and universities open and producing and not impose a 
short-term, heavy burden of an additional capital infusion in order to 
meet regulatory changes. Give them a reasonable amount of time that 
common sense says it would take to fix the problem instead of imposing 
this rammed-down-your-throat series of rules. October 3 is the week the 
Republican Congress will be bringing that before the American people 
and before this House.
  This is one I've been working on for quite awhile. I hope through 
part of our efforts during these evenings when we've talked about the 
cement MACT issue, the imposition of new regulations on greenhouse gas 
emissions for the cement factories, and the fact that we've had the 
opportunity to very effectively drive cement production out of this 
country and offshore to China, India, and maybe Mexico where they don't 
regulate at all the emissions, and then we think that somehow it's 
going to fix greenhouse gases. It's kind of insane that cleaning it up 
over here and driving people offshore to where they don't clean it up 
at all is going to help anything. It's going to hurt something, but 
that's a different argument.
  In the week of October 3, the cement MACT and two related rules are 
expected to affect approximately 100 cement plants in America. The cost 
is estimated to be somewhere between $3-4 billion for a $6-8 billion 
industry. Just do the math. That's a tremendous burden if these rules 
come into effect. These stringent requirements will be cost 
prohibitive, and the American cement industry, quite frankly, could be 
at risk across the board. We could wake up finding ourselves importing 
from other countries, by necessity, a product that we now lead the 
world on.
  You know, concrete is the second most used building material on 
Earth. The only thing that's used more than concrete is water. So 
Portland cement, which is the base ingredient in creating concrete, is 
as important to the building of infrastructure buildings, and basically 
everything that we live with, as anything on Earth. And we are in that 
business and we produce cement in various States in this country. We 
produce the Portland cement process, and these regulations would shut 
down factories and basically cause these international companies--
because all companies, whether they are based here or not, trade 
internationally--to move someplace else. And you wonder why jobs are 
going overseas. Well, in this case, in the cement industry, jobs will 
be going out of the country for one specific reason--government 
regulations beyond reasonableness.
  The Cement Sector Regulatory Relief Act sponsored by Representative 
Sullivan, my good friend from Oklahoma, will provide a legislative stay 
of these rules--hold off, brother, we need to look at these things--and 
provide the EPA with at least 15 months to repropose and finalize new, 
and here's the magic word, achievable rules that do not destroy jobs 
and provide employers with an extended compliance period. Once again, 
quit cramming it down our throat. Quit saying you've got to do it 
tomorrow. Give us time to implement reasonable rules. And as we look at 
these rules, let's analyze what they are going to cost us in the way of 
jobs and in the way of our economy, and take that into consideration as 
you plan out the reasonable way forward. You'll find that many of the 
things that we'll be taking up in the next couple of months,

[[Page 13077]]

right there is the secret key ingredient. We're going to come up with 
rules that you can achieve without destroying jobs that will still, 
over a long term, if you give time to comply, will meet the 
requirements that are necessary that people think to clean things up if 
they need to be cleaned up.
  October 3 is when we are going to take that up. Sometime in the month 
of October or November we will take up another bill.
  Oh, by the way, when you're talking about jobs in these Portland 
cement factories, these jobs are good jobs. These are labor jobs, but 
they are trained labor jobs. They are good jobs that pay somewhere 
between $65,000 and $85,000 each. Now, that's a good American job that 
ought to be done by an American, not by someone from China or from 
India because we have driven these industries out of our country.
  Coal ash. H.R. 2273, these are anti-infrastructure regulations 
commonly referred to as coal ash rules that will cost hundreds of 
billions of dollars to fix, according to the existing regulations, 
affect everything from concrete production to building products, like 
wallboard. The result is an estimated loss of well over 100,000 jobs.
  So, you know, at the end of this last month, we had no job gains. Not 
one job was created. That's what the report said. Well, just in the 
things that I've read to you so far as a result of these regulations, 
if all of this took place next month, just the numbers we've given, 
we're talking about 500,000 jobs so far that these bills that this 
Republican Congress is going to take up and try to get some 
reasonableness in this regulatory process.
  It's time for this Congress to not surrender the lawmaking--
rulemaking is lawmaking--authority to regulators without overseeing 
what they are doing and making sure that they are not harming our 
economy and harming what is going on in America and the jobs that 
everybody needs. We can't afford to lose more jobs. We have to keep the 
people working who have jobs, and then we've got to enhance these 
businesses in such a way that they feel that they are not going to be 
threatened by surprise regulations; and, therefore, they are willing to 
say, I have got stable ground under my feet and I can start to expand 
and hire again and start to invest my capital which right now is 
sitting in the bank into new and better products, services, factories, 
et cetera.
  So this coal ash bill that will cost this country 100,000 jobs, H.R. 
2273, the Coal Residual Reuse and Management Act, sponsored by 
Representative David McKinley of West Virginia, will create an 
enforceable minimum standard for regulation of coal ash by the States, 
allowing their use in a safe manner to produce products and protect 
jobs. It's just basically saying let the people who have this coal 
ash--and it's in certain States more than other places--use this coal 
ash and regulate this coal ash in such a manner that it does enhance 
the environment without destroying American jobs.
  Once again, the Congress has got to act, and the Republican Congress 
is prepared to act.
  Now, here comes my favorite of the crazy regulatory acts. The EPA is 
now proposing rules to regulate dust. Now, I live in Texas. We've got 
more highway miles than any other State in the Union, plenty of paved 
roads, but we've also got what we call farm roads and ranch roads. And 
in the western part of the State, those farm roads are covered with 
what we call caliche, which is a pulverized limestone, and over in the 
eastern part, they're covered with certain types of gravel. Some of 
it's river gravel and other things.

                              {time}  2020

  When a farmer drives up to his house on his driveway, it's usually 
got some kind of gravel or caliche on it and it kicks up dust. The EPA 
is now saying you can be fined for driving home every night on your 
gravel road. Now, what is your solution? Well, it's easy. Go out and 
spend $20,000 and pave your driveway--5 miles of driveway. So put 
pavement on it. Oh, but make sure you put a certain kind of pavement 
because it's got to have pavement that doesn't kick up dust. Arguably, 
if you use asphalt, it won't kick up dust, or concrete won't kick up 
dust--or not as much--but you might kick up a little more dust if you 
do what they call ``squirt top,'' which is what most farm roads are, 
which is tar with gravel spread on it. Until that gravel sets, it kicks 
up dust.
  So even if you went to the expense to build a farm road that was a 
paved farm road, your paving method might kick up enough dust to get 
them to fine you and take money out of your pocket anyway. And the EPA 
now wants to regulate dust. California does this already. I asked one 
of my California colleagues, How do you keep from getting fined in 
California while having the dust regulations? Here's what they said: 
Water down your roads every day so it doesn't have dust. Mud is okay. 
Dust is bad.
  Okay. Now that may be great for California. I don't know what the 
water situation is in California. But it hasn't rained in Texas. Some 
kids are about to go off to school and haven't seen rain in Texas, it 
hasn't rained so long. But seriously, I landed at the airport and 
looked out at this waterfall up here on the east coast, and said, Holy 
cow, we don't know what that looks like back home. Why don't they move 
all this water on the east coast down to Texas, where it hasn't rained, 
to my knowledge, in 6 months. And half of my neighboring county of 
Bastrop is burning to the ground because it's so dry and so hot, and we 
haven't had a rain in so long. We may be the only State in America 
that's praying that a hurricane will hit our coast so we can get some 
rain.
  Are you going to tell that farmer that the only way he's getting that 
water that he's feeding his animals is through shallow wells that may 
have gone dry on him, or deep wells he has to drill to get to 
additional water under the ground, or windmills that are pumping that 
water, if you are out West, which are not that deep, and a lot of them 
have gone dry--his precious water that his livestock and his family 
needs to survive, he's got to take it out and squirt it on his road so 
he can get home at night?
  Now, does that make economic sense to the American people? I don't 
think so. But then if you sit in the big EPA building in Washington, 
D.C., and have never even seen one of these roads and probably never 
been outside this Beltway, it may make perfect sense to that person in 
this paved world that we live in inside the Beltway. But it doesn't 
make sense to the average person that's trying to make a living all 
across the rural parts of the United States. And not just rural, but 
all across the United States where, unfortunately, we kick up dust. By 
the way, plowing kicks up dust. So then you can only plow when the 
fields are wet. Did you ever plow when the fields are wet? The only 
person who would sit in the EPA office and think that the farm products 
magically appear at their grocery store would know that you can't get 
off in a muddy field and plow effectively. Yes, you can turn up some 
moisture at the right time, and you can keep dust down, and farmers do. 
They don't want their top soil blowing away like it did in the Dust 
Bowl. They've learned their lesson about that, and they're doing the 
best they can, and I would commend them for doing it.
  I went to school in Lubbock, Texas, back in the 1960s, at the end of 
what we call the Dust Storm era. And because of modern farming methods 
and so forth, they still have dust storms up there, but they're nothing 
like what they had in the fifties, nothing like what we had in the 
sixties, and I would argue that because of good modern farming methods, 
we keep the dust to a minimum. But we still sometimes have half the 
State of New Mexico blow through the panhandle of Texas.
  Now, who are you going to fine? The State of New Mexico? The New 
Mexico farmers? The Texas farmers where it lands? Who's going to be 
responsible for all that dust that's out there in the air? Well, the 
EPA says somebody is, because they set regulations, and that would be a 
violation of these regulations. The biggest shortage of anything

[[Page 13078]]

in this town is common sense. This is the most nonsensical rule of 
anything that's come down.
  One of our new freshman Congressmen, Kristi Noem, is a smart lady. 
She knows rural America. She knows the ridiculousness of this set of 
EPA rules. She's come up with a farm dust bill which we will take up 
this winter to make EPA start using some common sense. The President 
was asked a question about this in one of his meetings here recently at 
a town hall. He sent this farmer on a bureaucratic wild goose chase and 
he never got anything in return. So as a result of that, that farmer, 
his efforts which--that wild goose chase produced nothing that was 
satisfactory--Representative Kristi Noem of South Dakota has H.R. 1633, 
which would protect American farmers and jobs by establishing a 1-year 
prohibition against revising any national ambient air quality standards 
applicable to coarse particulate matter--that's dust--and limiting 
Federal regulations of dust which are already regulated under State and 
local laws. In other words, let the States take care of it.
  Let me tell you something. This is not one of those Texas brags. We 
had dust storms when I went to school where girls didn't wear dresses 
in the spring because it would pick up pea gravel the size of a dime 
with those 60-mile-an-hour winds coming across the plains and it would 
blow that gravel so hard against their bare legs, if they had on 
dresses it would literally cut them off if they tried to walk to class. 
Now that's an act of God. Nobody created that wind. And certainly pea 
gravel is about as big a particulate matter that would be flying around 
anywhere. But the Federal Government doesn't control the wind, and it 
never will. We've got to get some reasonableness back into what's going 
on.
  Finally, because I've been talking about this now for over a year, 
and in my office we are tracking every regulatory agency, and every day 
we're seeing new and bizarre concepts of what we need to do from 
regulatory agencies--we're seeing bugs shut down major highway 
projects. When the President laughed and he said he learned that 
shovel-ready jobs are not really shovel-ready jobs, he should have gone 
on to tell you why many of those shovel-ready jobs weren't shovel 
ready, and it was because of regulations created by the regulatory 
agencies that stopped legitimate road and bridge projects that were 
funded. I have one in my district right now that is funded and the 
dozers are on the ground, ready to move, and that project is shut down 
by one of these many, many regulations. It's the same across the 
country.
  We can't do today what FDR did. It's great to talk about what FDR 
did. I don't think it accomplished a whole lot in getting us out of the 
Depression, but that's my opinion. But the facts are you couldn't build 
a Hoover Dam today. Just up and go out there and start building a 
Hoover Dam. My Lord, just to build an electric power plant, the number 
of regulatory agencies and permits that you would have to have would 
cover the walls of this Chamber before you even get to break ground. 
I've seen those rules put on walls. It's an amazing number of rules. We 
are a world of government control of everything. That's what these 
regulatory acts are about.
  Finally, this Congressman, John Carter, because of looking at this 
stuff now just for the last year or so, I really and truly think the 
best thing we can do to give the stability to the employers who employ 
people is to basically ban the implementation of any new Federal 
regulations from now through January 31, 2013, guarantee a 2-year 
window for businesses to hire without any fear of new costs from 
regulations, and certain exceptions would be allowed for the military 
or foreign affairs or internal agency management and personnel rules. 
So they'd still be able to have regulations that fit in those 
categories and make sure that we keep our foreign operations and our 
military operating. They have to make rules to operate under. We would 
exempt those particular things. But the rest of them, we would say: 
Timeout. Continue your studies. Continue your discussions. I would 
encourage you to extend an arm out to business to say, This is what 
we're looking at. Let's hear what you think.

                              {time}  2030

  Let's start putting ourselves together with the idea that people are 
part of this environment, too.
  People are really what makes up this country. Without people, we're 
just a barren land. People, to live, need to have a job, and the people 
who create jobs need to have a reason for hiring people and giving them 
a job. People who have ideas--the great driving force of America, the 
new idea. We just have so many examples of new ideas just in the high-
tech industry and the communications industry, the revolution that has 
taken place just in the last 10 years of new ideas. Those new ideas 
come from the freedom to think and the belief that you can take that 
idea and put it into reality without somebody stepping on your toes and 
preventing you from doing it.
  These regulations and this control from Washington, D.C., this 
cradle-to-grave mentality that seems to be running inside this beltway 
and the creation of these regulatory rules is putting the brakes on our 
economy and putting fear in the hearts of American entrepreneurs and 
businesspeople and employers who want to make their business better by 
hiring those good people that we're graduating from our colleges and 
universities, those good people that are trained in trained skills that 
we need to put to work in America, and we'll put them to work in real 
jobs, not government-created jobs with borrowed money but real jobs 
that produce something and create wealth and make us and continue to 
keep us the most prosperous Nation on Earth.
  It doesn't come from government; it comes from the people. The people 
are the wealth of this Nation--their ideas, their entrepreneurship, the 
investment of their own personal capital, and their willingness to take 
a risk on America because they know America is great. And to people who 
don't think we're great or think that they're smarter and can be inside 
this beltway and make rules that can do a better job of telling you how 
to run your life or how to drive home on your farm road than you know, 
I say, Get out of the way.
  That's what this fall is going to be about. We're going to be 
bringing these things up. And these are things that are going to be 
discussed and talked about and voted on this fall because we 
Republicans believe that the right path to create jobs and create 
wealth in America is to get the regulators to start thinking in terms 
of creating jobs, not destroying jobs; enhancing businesses, not 
negating businesses; and to put America back to work.
  And if we put America back to work, all the rest gets better: the 
debt goes down; the tax revenues go up; the country has more to pay 
back the people we owe, which ought to be our first priority. We can 
get our financial house back in order. We can get our credit rating 
back that was taken away from us, and we can start operating like 
America has always operated. The business of this country is business; 
and as much as that was criticized back in the twenties, that statement 
is true today just like it was then. It's the American people that give 
the American people jobs, not the government.
  Let's put the brakes on these regulatory things. We're going to do 
that this fall. I look forward to it. Pay attention to it. Members of 
this House and anyone around the country who has an interest, pay 
attention to it. Give us your input because we are bound and determined 
to level out and stabilize that playing field that business creates 
jobs on so that we can put America back to work.
  Mr. Speaker, I thank you for your time, and I yield back the balance 
of my time.

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