Chapter 4
Reduce Regulations.
Reduce regulations.
I just completed a book called Kill the EPA, which outlines in very specific detail what the US Congress and the new President must do so that American companies can hire more and more and more and even more Americans—young and old. The major maxim is to reduce harmful regulations. The book is at the printers and I have yet to receive a copy as I write this new book, but it will be available for all for free online at www.kellyforussenate .com. A hard copy of it with a nifty cover will be available at www.itjungle.com/store.htmlfor their going rate. IT Jungle carries all of my recent books, including this one in hard copy.
The bearer of the most bad news on the regulatory front is the EPA. They are simply bad actors. Few would argue that we need commonsense regulations to protect workers, families and the environment. The part the EPA missed and keeps on missing is the notion of common sense. As in all things in life, we must pursue a balanced approach to the environment.
Unfortunately, way too much regulation is the modus operandi of the EPA and other major government regulators.
The EPA is not the only sinner in the government, however. The team, headed by the Regulation Czar—Cass Sunstein, have been driving business nuts with new regulations on a continual basis. The results of overregulation are well demonstrated today with our dismal economy and poor prospects for recovery.
While the US is searching for a jobs solution and an economic solution, excessive government regulations continue to force American companies to send their operations to foreign countries, taking much-needed jobs with them. These companies and those jobs are not going to be easy to get back.
According to the Small Business Administration (SBA), since 2005, just a few years ago, the number of federal regulations has increased by over 60 percent. Many of us in our own lives have considered going into business for ourselves. Those of us who took a shot at it know first-hand how difficult it is to get started. Instead of doing all it can to help, government is always the biggest obstacle.
Instead of facilitating new business startups, the government is a major impediment. We face many local, county, and state obstacles to be able to fire up something with a chance of success. It is not just a matter of conceiving the best idea in the spirit of Edison and then charging forth. Bureaucrat upon bureaucrat extorts the entrepreneur and the innovator so that today, most regular people with great ideas would prefer to operate in the underground economy and never really try to be known to the “regulators” and the inspectors.
Regulations must be agnostic
These regulations cost our economy an awful lot of money and a lot of unproductive work in compliance and the paperwork to prove compliance. In addition to the cost of compliance, the latest green initiative about to go into effect is supposed to add over 200,000 new federal employees to the EPA at a cost of over $22 billion per year. Can any country afford such a burden? If elected Senator, I will vote against this measure for sure. You can count on that.
Big companies that ship jobs overseas have a good way of avoiding the EPA and other regulatory consequences. They move overseas and with good reason. They are out of reach from US regulators.
The US must stop punishing its businesses. Yes, corporations are knaves and if they were really persons, they would be unseemly and arrogant and self-indulging, and they would not care who they hurt. Even not being persons, other than in a fictitious nature, they are able to carry the same characteristics as we just defined for an ignoramus.
Small companies, more and more are looking at the 60% new federal regulations, which are designed to kill capitalism, and they conclude quite appropriately, “why bother?” If they are successful after working 20 hour days for years, this government will then try to take the fruits of their hard work—their earnings and capital, and redistribute it to others who choose to stay home and collect a government stipend.
It is upside down and it will stay there until again it is respected in the US for people to work hard and for them to keep the fruits of their labor while employing tons and tons of other people. I don’t know of any man who was ever employed by a poor person. So, let’s not denigrate the rich so much. The rich are the reason why all of us have a shot at doing so well. I may not like to be in their company but they have helped America more than Obama can imagine.
On the statistical side, the reports we have been discussing also show that compliance with federal environmental regulations costs small firms 364 percent more than large firms based on revenue. It is simply outrageous and it must stop.
All of us like to go outside and after a length of time; we need to wash the outside from our clothing. We call that doing the laundry. Long before we were created, God permitted wind and rain to be prevalent on the planet. Since wind and rain carry dirt and grime, is it possible that they are that will become banned by the EPA or some other agency – perhaps the Department of Energy?
The EPA can decree that wind and rain are banned simply because they do not like these natural forces and the damage they may cause. But, they do not do so—because this would cause the EPA to look as fools to all of their subjects. Wind and rain seem to have a secret, EPA unapproved energy supply behind them. It is called God. Perhaps the EPA does not like God either but they do love Mother Nature, who last time I checked reported to God. Regardless, they cannot control God or Mother nature, but they can sure be annoying.
Rather than let it run rampant, the US must rein in the EPA and all bad job killing agencies and become realistic about our current abilities and technologies, and become pro-American. If one of the by-laws of the EPA was that it had to hold a pro-American posture, I would suspect it would be devastating to the loyalist environmentalists in the EPA.
Could there possibly be about 10,000 of 18,000 resignations by now? Eventually most would want out. I suspect that tells enough of the story for regular Americans to understand.
I am not suggesting that corporations be given a free rein, but it helps to know there are 50 EPA like agencies run by the individual states but those agencies are like the EPA once was when it was OK. They care about the environment and their state and they are not about to place the environment in front of the needs of the human beings in their states.
US states have environments!
I have promoted the notion that the states need to be the focal point for handling the environment. The Feds (EPA) are ready to put us all in jail for missing the basket when we simply shoot a crunched up candy wrapper trying to score a fictitious goal. A miss is litter. A goal is compliance. We must mount a defense against such intrusion in our lives.
There is no real environment for the federal government. Other than Washington D.C., the feds own none of America. Environments therefore exist only in the states. Since each state has its own environment and the federal government has no environment per se, the states should be in control, not the feds. It would appear logical—even for Spock.
The term “red tape” was invented to describe the perception of government intrusion in our lives. We need to cut all the red tape and look for free-market solutions to increase private-sector job growth. One way to begin is to get the federal regulators off the backs of businesses. That would be a great start. States actually understand what is needed. The feds are seemingly locked up in a university lab looking for a place to try out their next experiment. Please stay out of Pennsylvania.
Regulators can de-certify regulations
Always trying to influence perception above reality, President Obama, the regulator in chief, issued Executive Order 13563, on January 18, 2011 calling on every federal agency to review their regulations to ensure they “promote predictability and reduce uncertainty; take into account benefits and costs; and identify and use the best, most innovative, and least burdensome tools for achieving regulatory ends.” Obama is the master of rhetoric and spin. You and I both know he did not mean it.
Despite the press opportunity and photo ops, and despite the hoopla of these major pronouncements, there was a catch. Independent federal agencies were not subjected to the executive order. Well, who was subjected then? Obama does not lie. He simply uses deceit or chicanery to get his work done. You have to pay attention to catch him. Since most Americans simply want government to work, Obama rarely gets caught.
Quite strangely, the EPA, the biggest violator of American rights ever to be permitted to exist in our country, chose to answer the Obama optional call. I would have thought the EPA would have abstained because they are really being watched today as they are hurting all Americans. On top of the big watch, our mostly useless Congress is now evaluating the usefulness of the EPA. That is amusing to a point.
Nonetheless, the EPA chose to conduct its own review of Obama’s decree on its own agency. This did surprise me. But, as I think about it; it is like the farmer comes in and suggests to the fox, which has been hired to watch the henhouse that the number of hens disappearing has been increasing. The fox tells the farmer he will check it out but he intimates there must have been a weasel in the neighborhood. What kind of review would the EPA conduct on its own regulation?
If you talked to some CEOs that are in the energy industry, you would not even know the EPA went through the charade. Should the fox be the one responsible for an accurate count of the chickens? In my recent book, Kill the EPA, I identified the EPA as an agency that continually puts out regulations that are oppressive to American industry. The conclusion is that it needs to be dismantled and quickly.
Even though the EPA agreed to be examined, little to nothing changed. The President is in full control of this band of enforcers and he had no real reason to decrease its ability to further his agenda.
Dodd-Frank: second graders respond to the need for experts.
The Dodd-Frank financial reform bill is another regulatory killer. It only looks good to Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. Dodd was out in 2010 and in early December 2011, Frank announced he was leaving Congress. Dodd-Frank adds many more financial regulations on businesses and community banks. In this case the perpetrator is the Treasury Department.
You may remember when the economy almost fell apart in fall 2008. It was really an unparalleled financial disaster in our Nation’s history. The Wall Street monster separated trillions in wealth from investors whose only fault was that they believed in the system. Everybody that I know suffered a large reduction in the value of their retirement savings. Some say a generation’s worth of retirement was destroyed.
Neighborhoods, cities, and counties were crushed with foreclosures during this period and it was mostly because the government had demanded banks to stop making prudent loans. Credit checks on people who could not afford a mortgage were not permitted by the unofficial cadre of neighborhood police known as community organizers. And, yes, Acorn was one of the major perpetrators in the fiasco. Barack Obama’s “What me worry?” face somehow disassociated him from the reality of the financial collapse.
Dodd-Frank was Congress’s feeble attempt to make it so that such national trauma could never happen again. Many of us blame Dodd, who got one of those special deal mortgages from Countrywide. Countrywide called it a VIP mortgage discounts but some regular Joe’s would call it simple corruption. Frank of course is to blame as he is almost personally responsible for the debacle with Fannie and Freddie. But, true to form, of course, he never saw the need to admit to any of it. Hey, why go to jail if you don’t have to?
The Dodd-Frank financial reform bill has been law for almost two years now. Like many laws passed by our Congress, the original idea behind the bill—to help avoid another economic crisis—and how it turned out are two different things altogether. The bill was to reform or eliminate Freddie Mac and Fannie May and it was to simplify and add clarity to the banking system. It did neither. Instead it was another paper monstrosity put together by the Nancy Pelosi led 111th Congress. It consisted of about 400 new rules and when printed it took more than 2300 sheets of paper.
Ironically one of the worst parts of the Dodd-Frank law is something called the "Durbin Amendment." Every time you swiped your debit card at a store in the last two years or so, Dick Durbin, Democratic Senator from Illinois took a bow. His tiny amendment capped bank card interchange fees to help consumers. This stopped the banks from charging as much as they once did for a credit or debit transaction. On the surface, this is all good.
If banks felt they needed an extra dollar per transaction to remain profitable, the Dodd-Frank bill prevented them from increasing their fees. Though perhaps well-intentioned, Dodd and Frank and Durbin could not stop banks from making money. So, by stripping them of the ability to charge the fees they felt were right to assure their normal profit, the banks needed to come up with another way to make up for those lost revenues by instituting other fees.
You may remember one of the most public displays of a major bank’s response to Dodd-Frank in fall 2011when banks were trying to catch up on lost revenue. Bank America began to charge a $5.00 debit card fee. That is $60.00 per year whether you use the card or not. There was no legislation preventing them from doing it. It just proves that it is not really nice to fool with the mother of all banks!
Even if Bank America gets rid of this fee, they will figure out another way to gain back their profit margin. Dodd-Frank might just as well have required every neighbor to give every other neighbor $5.00 per month forever. You give $5.00 and you get $5.00 so is that really a good deal for anybody? It does, however, make the government look very powerful.
Dodd Frank was not all bad but there is a lot of bad in the banking system today. Have you noticed that nobody is loaning anything to anybody today. I could not get a car loan this past week for a high mileage mini-van for my daughter from a bank that I have been doing business with for years. They would give me a loan but they wanted it secured by cash. No wonder nobody is buying anything—especially homes.
The best thing in Dodd-Frank is that they raised the $100,000 limit on deposit insurance to $250,000.00. There are also major restrictions for banks when they go to casinos or use risky investment contraptions. They can no longer put your money at risk for their profits. This is good.
Overall, since Obama took office, over $38 billion in new major regulations came into being so it is tougher and tougher to conduct business in the US. This overly-regulated environment creates more uncertainty than any other factor, causing businesses to either sit on their cash-hordes or do business overseas. Analysts suggest that the notion of uncertainty is the greatest obstacle for investing and hiring
There had been some good bills in the past such as the Glass Steagall Bill which was put in place to stop the abuses that contributed to the Great Depression. To put the Dodd Frank bill in perspective, at 2300 pages, it is fifty-five times larger in terms of pages than Glass Steagall (42 pages), which was introduced in 1933 and repealed in 1999. Its repeal is why banks were able to go rogue and create havoc until 2008 when they just about all crashed along with the whole US economy.
Dodd-Frank is 34 times the length of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (145 pages), which in 1999 was the act which repealed the most protective and beneficial parts of Glass-Steagall. The 1933 bill provided protective barriers in the market among banking companies, securities companies and insurance companies that prohibited any one institution from acting as any combination of an investment bank, a commercial bank, and an insurance company.
The Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act undid all the good that helped us recover from the depression. In other words, commercial banks, investment banks, securities firms, and insurance companies were again permitted to consolidate. The legislation was signed into law by President Bill Clinton to satisfy Republican demands for looser regulations while the Democrats agreed for their own selfish purposes. By doing a quid pro quo, Republicans agreed to looser credit with the Community Reinvestment Act, which is another doozer of a Congressional Act that helped bring the US down in 2008.
There have been other bad financial bills to which Barney Frank and Chris Dodd conspired and upon which other leading Democrats had their grimy fingerprints. The major sins of Dodd-Frank unfortunately are in trifecta form. 1. It did not undo Gramm–Leach–Bliley and bring back Glass-Steagall. 2. It did not undo the problems with the Community Reinvestment Act permitting Acorn to determine who got a home loan. 3. It left Fannie and Freddie to continue to strangle the American taxpayer whenever they needed a buck from the mismanagement of national assets.
Yes, a moderate level of regulation is necessary in large and vital sectors of the economy such as finance, housing, and healthcare. But, 2300 pages permit too many agenda items to be filled long before any real help to the country is proposed. Huge legislation and regulation is surely not the solution to the current economic problems that face the United States. In fact it is quite the contrary.
Banks are not model children but they are necessary for our modern society. It would help for the President to stop demonizing banks—as if they are not vital to the credit needs of our country. Banks are needed for new business formation and many other reasons. Why the banks and the country need to be at odds on everything cannot be helpful to either. It is time for regulations to take a back seat to the potential for economic prosperity.
Nobody can run as fast with a full grown human being on their back as they can if running free. The same goes for a business trying to survive while having to carry a huge pack of regulators along with every move. We need businesses to be allocating their capital towards expansion, which would call for the hiring of new people. We need businesses to be allocating their resources to invest in new facilities and technologies.
Unfortunately, just to stay even, business are now spending dollar after dollar just to figure out how the latest government regulation can hurt their business. Then they must spend more dollars to assure they can survive. It may be a great day for lawyers but not for regular Americans. As little as I trust the government, I see its big hammer appears always cocked to end any of my personal aspirations. Moreover, the hammer of regulation is ready to whack the opportunities identified by business. This regulatory hammer is feared more than perhaps anything else by businesses trying to move forward and trying to get to where they can hire people. Government today is not the solution. It is the problem.
It would behoove Treasury to address overly burdensome financial regulations that slow job growth and fail to improve consumer protections. I do not expect that they will cross Barack Obama and the will of his puppet, the former Barney Frank so this problem more than likely will be with us until a new Congress steps in with a big broom.
Obama gave over thirty speeches in a few months after he announced the infamous stimulus 3, a.k.a the “2011 jobs bill.” He used it as a campaign gimmick to gain a lot of press in late 2011. I sure hope Americans reject it for the fraud which it is.
Don’t you wonder why Congress and / or the President choose to place labels on legislation that does not really describe its intent? Why do they purposely try to deceive the American people? The Obama jobs bill is simply a porkulus bill and it will feed crony capitalism in time for the next election. I hope it does not work. It is plain and simple bunk? Will Americans buy it? I sure hope we are all smarter this time around.
No name generic bills
A suggestion I heard recently is that the bills should have no names, just the numbers they already have or perhaps an amalgam of their sponsors. It is obvious to many of us looking at what is going on that Obama’s jobs bill is not really an honest jobs bill. People, including Obama, should simply be honest. Why won’t Obama and the Congress simply say what they really mean? Would America not be better off if this were the case? Why can elected officials not simply tell the truth? Don’t hold your breath, but it is a nice idea.
Shall we ask for common sense?
Hard as it is to believe, doctors and others in the medical industry are also complaining about the massive amount of paperwork necessary to run their businesses and to receive proper remuneration for services under government provided healthcare—Medicare and Medicaid.
Who would not agree that unnecessary paperwork—overly burdensome to home health care providers and consumers, should be eliminated? The problem of course is that government bureaucrats love regulations and the paper that regulations consume. It gives them something to do. If only we required our legislators to take a course in common sense before they voted on their first bill. Would we be able to improve their efficacy?
In that light, it would not be a bad idea to have continuing education credits offered for members of Congress so that they can sign up for graded seminars on all matters of government. As a side benefit, their constituents could then learn their grades? Would it not be nice to know how well they did when tested on the matters of the day?
Additionally, the both houses of Congress should also attend required educational seminars about their Party’s perspective on various topics. Again, all of these seminars should be graded so that Party members can really know the real abilities of those they have placed into the highest offices of the land. Maybe we would have less chance of incompetent lawmakers gaining such important positions if we knew more of the truth about them before they were permitted by law to mess up the country.
New regulations on limiting regulations
Who are the bad guys? The answer is that they are everywhere in the Federal Government and for the most part, much of the work that is appropriate work should be handled by the states. At the top of everyone’s list, however, is Harvard Professor Cass Sunstein, Obama’s Regulation Czar.
His real title is Director of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). Sunstein is overall responsible for regulations in the Obama regime and to say the least, he does not think like regular Americans. He is a brilliant man but his thoughts and my thoughts rarely line up together. I have concluded that sometimes brilliance can be deadly to the person who does not have control of the situation.
Sunstein’s major responsibility is supposedly to examine the many regulations that exist and get rid of the bad ones. Some say that progressives, such as Sunstein, have never met a freedom-limiting regulation that they do not like. The news of nixed regulations from the Sunstein camp is actually not much news. In other words, there are substantially more re-approvals.
The major accomplishment so far, after several years of work from the Sunstein camp is that milk is no longer classified as “oil.” I kid you not and since it is no longer a type of oil, dairy farmers are now exempted from the burdens of the 1970’s EPA-era law that declared that milk was an oil. Would that mean if you cozy up tonight for some great sleep, and some kind soul brings you some warm milk, and you have not heard it is no longer oil, will your constitutional sitting in the AM be or not be appropriate. Will it foster the proper leaving? Think about that one for awhile!
At the country level, that should mean that costly rules designed to prevent oil spills that are really milk spills no longer need to be strictly followed by the dairy industry. Well, even though it is forty years late, at least it is something. Thank you Cass!
Sunstein has actively defended the work of his regulators as you might expect and he has taken issue with the popular notion that regulations are being produced more rapidly by the Obama Administration than under previous administrations.
Sunstein says that the “costs [of his regulations] are not out of line by historical standards. And he notes that ”the annual cost of regulations has not increased during the Obama administration.”
The obvious reason that Sunstein is not being heralded by the conservative press for limiting regulations is because it isn’t true. Obama has imposed regulations on America at a much faster clip than any of his predecessors and thus Sunstein’s perspective, as sharp a guy as he is, can be graded as False.
Despite all the liberal media hype that his department was going to root out obsolete rules, the cost of regulations continues to rise.
Who writes legislation / regulations?
We can blame the staffers in the many costly and mostly unconstitutional US agencies as well as lobbyists for writing legislation and regulations. They write more stuff than all of Congress combined. Yet the role of writing legislation was not given to staffers and lobbyists by the founders; it was given to Congress. Over the years, our Congress has made its job softer and sweeter while others drafted the laws for our country.
When you look at the hundreds of thousands of pages of laws and rules put out every year, some like Obamacare, which approaches 3000 pages of legalese, it is clear that all members of Congress, not only have not read the bills; the Congress, whose signatures are on the bills, have not even written them.
Environmentalists and lobbyists from anti-business non-governmental organizations write the laws for our politicians more often than not, and then they influence the agencies that fine tune the laws into regulations so their pet requirements are included in the acts. This is a real crime and it must end.
To assure that this does not happen in the future, I would propose that a Congressional watchdog group be hired to capture the proper statistics on who writes what and then publish a monthly report. Regular Americans should know if their Congress is doing its job or whether the lobbyists are doing it for them. Additionally, some legislation, prohibiting lobbyists from writing legislation would certainly help.
Do regulations really hurt business?
Bernie Marcus, who is now over 80 years old decries the fact that nobody today would be able to get past the government regulations to be able to form a company like his baby, “The Home Depot.” Though retired for some time, Marcus knows why nobody today wants to start the next Home Depot. He says that it is because of the restrictions imposed by obscene government regulations. In his own words, Marcus says:
“They’ve maligned the word capitalism so bad, that no one has any touch with business.”
Marcus feels guilty that after living through his own great success in building Home Depot, other entrepreneurs are held back by the simple fact that “It can’t be done any more.” Marcus cites environmental regulations and constant lawsuits which make creating new businesses almost impossible.
I hope that like I do, you do not feel good about this. I know there are a few radicals on the leftist cause that would prefer to shoot all successful capitalists so those who have no idea of running a business can be enabled to take over.
Can we not say that without a shot, we are now experiencing what this warning idea put forth? The President of this United States has no idea of what running a business might be, and it surely seems that he has no concern for those who must produce, to be able to produce.
Though many economists see government uncertainty regarding taxation and regulatory policy as reasons why businesses are holding on to their capital and not investing in the US, Marcus sees it differently. He does not suggest this is not true but he thinks that certainty, rather than uncertainty is the real jobs and economic killer.
Marcus believes that businesses know for sure that they can expect the worst from government. It is a certainty that government is going to raise the cost of doing business. He cites Obamacare, EPA regulations, and many other government rules and regulations and notes that such certainty of impending doom leads businesses to shut down rather than expand.
David Park is the new chief at the Job Creators Alliance (JCA). He offers a killer statistic that shows how tough it is for businesses to get started in the US today. The initial public offerings (IPOs) for companies under a million dollars have decreased by 77% since the beginning of the Regulation Age, which he notes began with Sarbanes Oxley legislation. That places new small business startups at less than 23% of the number when times were not so tough.
Consequently, thousands of small businesses have been frustrated or destroyed by the anti-business atmosphere that the government continues to push in the US.
The EPA: the prince agency of regulators
I have called for the elimination of the EPA, Commerce, Interior, Energy, Education and a number of other bloated nasty federal agencies at least until such time as we can reset our economy without such constraints and move on to solving the problem of what is actually killing us. The Environmental protection Agency (EPA) is the worst offender. Yet, somehow, it has been able to get more powerful each year under Obama.
For example when the EPA issued a new regulation in April 2010 requiring housing contractors to take extra precautions around hazardous lead paint, it had a big impact on legitimate contractors. Those small contractors that took the law seriously had a tough time complying. In fact, Kathy Faia’s little construction company followed the new regulation to the letter of the law because she felt the competition had to do the same also.
She invested many dollars to comply. Among the costs, she sent one of her workers to attend formal classes to become government-certified in the paint removal procedures. The company bought expensive coveralls, special goggles, gloves, hoods, rubber boots and anything suggested in the law for such workers. The company developed new methods for the remodeling crews to enshroud houses with plastic bubble wrap to prevent lead paint flakes, which potentially can cause damage to the brain and nervous system, from escaping into the atmosphere. Faia was not sure of the risk of such damaging results as she had never observed such health hazards in her prior work but she complied nonetheless. Feel free to read more at: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-11-13/markets/30393392_1_epa-lead-paint-paint-flakes#ixzz1f1uXDmEK
The bottom line is that after such hard work, her costs were raised so much just a little more than a year later; Faia’s small, family-owned construction business became financially ruined. The new cost of doing business made it much harder for her to compete for remodeling contracts.
You see, the EPA does not have the resources to check to assure everybody is complying so when Faia competed with companies that chose not to add the EPA burden to their costs, she lost. Additionally, contractors with illegal alien workers were able to get more and more business in the US as they rarely comply with any regulations. Against these contractors, Faia also lost.
EPA rulemaking is destroying jobs and harming the economic recovery all across the country. The Hippie types at the EPA have no idea about how to run a business so they press forward with regulations that may permit an extra iota of cleaner air while they put real like Americans such as Kathy in the bread lines.
Republicans are taking the impact of regulations far more seriously than Democrats. Since January 2011, with the 112th Congress, the GOP-controlled House has taken at least 160 votes on environmental issues, including over 80 that targeted the EPA. There is a list compiled by Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has all of the particulars.
Congressional review
It is time for Congress to step in to help reverse the regulatory tide. As a first step, it should bar regulators from imposing major new burdens without the expressed signed approval of Congress. Congress should also demand that there be an automatic sun-setting of old regulations and there needs to be a pool of experts, who work for Congress, to help enhance Congress’s own ability to assess regulatory costs.
I
It is not just Obama; though he is the worst ever. The rise in regulatory burdens began long before Obama. Right now, however, it has reached the overflow stage under his watch. Rather than ignore the danger, our lawmakers must immediately address it. That really means that the do-nothing Senate, of which Bob Casey Jr. is a proud member, need to bring up the legislation already introduced in the House, and pass it for the good of America.
The balance between federal regulation and job creation is a very fine line and it is now overwhelmingly controlled by the regulators. The President is not looking for compromise on that one. If we pay attention, however, and we insist that Congress do its job, we all can win.