Small Businesses
Floor Speech
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Mr. BARRASSO. I am delighted to be joining my colleagues, Senator Isakson from Georgia, and Senator Wicker is here also from Mississippi. We think this is very important.
The leader started talking about today and said we need to focus on jobs. That is what we wanted to focus on for all of the time of the Obama administration. But, no, the President ignored jobs--ignored jobs his first year in office, ignored jobs his second year in office. Here we are more than halfway through his third year in office, and finally the President has noticed what has been on the minds of the American people.
This is a President and a majority leader who forced through this body a health care law that is bad for patients; bad for providers, the nurses and doctors who take care of those patients; and bad for taxpayers, ignoring what the American people said they wanted to focus on, which was jobs, the economy, the debt, the spending. We see a majority leader who led this body to adding more to the debt--now $14 trillion in debt--more debt, more spending, more money that is owed to China.
We need to put Americans to work. We need to get Americans back to work. The majority leader talked about 14 million Americans looking for jobs. There are over 4 million who have not worked for over a year. In that kind of a situation, it is going to be a lot harder for those folks to ever get a job again--ever get a job again.
And the regulations just keep on coming. A month ago, the President came to the Hill, visited, and had a joint session of Congress. He said: I want to get rid of some of these regulations. He said: I can identify regulations--he came out with a list of about $4 billion worth of regulations--to lower the cost of business over the next 5 years. But in the month of September alone, this administration came out with 230 proposed rules and 338 final rules. And if you go to what this administration says that those rules are going to cost the people of this country, cost the job creators of this country, even the administration, using their own numbers, that cost is going to be $10 billion.
I heard our colleague from Georgia talk about the paperwork, the compliance officers. Just yesterday, this administration came out, under Dodd-Frank, with new rules and regulations--proposed rules. They took only 11 pages of this massive bill, but only 11 pages, and when you look at the 298 pages of proposed rules that have come out, what do the government regulators, the Obama administration regulators, say it is going to cost the businesses of this country in terms of manhours having to be spent to comply with the paperwork? These aren't my numbers, these aren't Senators Isakson's numbers, these aren't Senator Wicker's numbers. Mr. President, 6,283,000 hours of paperwork. That is what the government experts say is going to have to be spent on paperwork to comply with one component of the Dodd-Frank law. How is that going to help? How is that kind of a drag on a society going to help create jobs?
You know, the President says: If the Republicans have ideas, we want to hear them. The majority leader stood here and said: If the Republicans have ideas, we want to hear them. Well, a month ago, a month ago to this day, when the
President came to the Hill, earlier that morning a number of colleagues, House and Senate Members, came to talk about a Western Caucus Jobs Frontier bill, a number of bills Republicans have proposed breaking down Washington's barriers to America's red, white, and blue jobs.
The majority leader said we ought to spend more money. The President said we ought to spend more money. The President talked about his so-called stimulus plan, and he said it was going to save or create 3.5 million jobs. We have lost millions of jobs since this President came into office.
The President talked about green jobs. He said his clean-energy policies would create 5 million new jobs. We have just seen the Solyndra situation--1,100 people fired because of bad bets by this administration. This is an administration that should not be betting with the taxpayers' money. It is not the administration's money. It is not the President's money. That is why the American people are so up in arms. They see what all of this spending is doing, and it is not helping jobs.
I see my colleague from Mississippi is here. We can go back and forth and talk about this. I know he has examples and situations in Mississippi. I see them in Wyoming all of the time, people having to deal with the redtape coming out of Washington. The President talks a pretty good game, but when you look at what is happening out there, the American people are very disappointed. The American people deserve better than what they are getting from this administration.
So I would ask my colleague from Mississippi whether there are things he sees happening to his friends and neighbors at home that we need to share with the rest of the country?
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Mr. BARRASSO. Well, I know you see this in Georgia and in Mississippi. We know what doesn't work. We know what doesn't work is more borrowing and more spending and overregulation and the threat of raising taxes on people and the job creators of this country. So there is much to be done, and that is why we actually came out with this Jobs Frontier--the western caucus did--because we want to increase affordable American energy.
The President, when he was running for office, said under his proposals electricity costs would necessarily skyrocket. If you want a productive, vibrant economy, you need low-cost energy, and if you want a secure nation, you need American energy to do that. So when my colleague from the Gulf State of Mississippi talks about energy in the gulf, there is a lot there. I can talk about Wyoming from the standpoint of energy being available on Federal land, which is being blocked by regulations. We ought to be exploring for that energy as well as in Alaska. So there is much we can do to make our country stronger, safer, more secure, better, and more vibrant, but the proposal put forth by the President--and here I agree with my colleague from Mississippi--is another spending bill--just spending--as the first stimulus was. It is a bill that is not going to do what we need to do to get this economy going in a vibrant sense. From my perspective, the No. 1 thing we should do is stop doing what we know doesn't work.
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