REINS Act provides smarter regulation, better environment for job creation

Last month I visited with a manufacturing business in New Albany on the verge of a major expansion. This expansion will allow them to create a few hundred new jobs directly, and help grow a support industry that will pump even more money into the local economy. They're poised to be the largest business of their type in the world.

This is exactly the sort of success story that southern Indiana needs in order to get Hoosiers back to work. But there's a serious problem with costly federal regulations.

The company needs a $3 million bridge loan to bring everything online and begin production. On paper, they are a dream client for any bank: They've landed a world-renowned entrepreneur and billionaire investor, already secured a new facility, purchased millions of dollars in new capital equipment, and have several high-profile commercial clients with purchase orders ready who are patiently (for now) waiting on production. And still, thanks to new federal banking regulations, the business is having trouble getting the final piece of bank financing in place.

Unfortunately, such problems with regulatory roadblocks are neither confined to bank financing, nor unique to manufacturing businesses.

For example, the Wall Street Journal recently noted 175 diverse businesses in Indiana appealed to the Environmental Protection Agency to ditch just one of its new regulations because of the cost. Even the EPA admits the regulation will burden our economy with at least $90 billion in annual compliance costs by 2020.

Such regulatory compliance costs stack up, and are major impediments to American job creation. In fact, the Small Business Administration recently found American businesses are saddled with over $1.75 trillion in compliance costs annually. And that number grows at an alarming rate each year as unelected government employees pile on new regulations, including 100 in 2010--and a whopping 218 in 2011--that each have an economic impact in excess of $100 million.

So what can Congress do?

For starters, we must realize that while some government regulation is necessary, government edicts oftentimes have unintended consequences, especially where jobs are concerned. While nobody wants to return to an era where the 2008 financial meltdown can be repeated, or where businesses can dump their waste in whatever river they please, Washington needs to restore a sense of balance to its rulemaking.

President Obama, to his credit, ordered a regulatory review earlier this year to root out job-crushing regulations. He also reaffirmed his commitment to repealing such measures in his recent address to Congress. But we must do more than just identifying bad regulations after they've already sent American jobs overseas. We need to ensure such regulations never become finalized in the first place.

That's why I'm a co-sponsor of the REINS Act, a bill that would require any executive regulation with an economic impact of $100 million or more to come before Congress for an up or down vote.

The Act would ensure a jobs-focused cost-benefit analysis is performed before new regulations take effect, and would also give individuals and businesses the opportunity to weigh in with their elected representatives. New regulatory proposals could be improved in the process. And, by requiring Congress to take a stand on difficult issues, the REINS Act would discourage elected representatives from giving unelected federal bureaucrats the discretion to implement such a wide range of new regulations in the first place.

It's this sort of bipartisan, common-sense bill that Washington must embrace if we are serious about turning around this stalled economy. For Hoosiers looking for work and the businesses hoping to hire them, regulatory relief can't come soon enough.

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