Political Quotes

“My pleasure, and I thank the gentleman from Colorado for yielding. Mr. Speaker, we have a great challenge in this Nation: to be able to get our people back to work. Right now we are paying, as a country, $1.75 trillion per year in regulatory costs. As was noted earlier, small businesses are incurring better than $10,000 per employee. That is a burden that they cannot sustain, hoping to be able to create jobs and to be able to get this economy moving. I'd like to be able to just give you a couple of real, personal examples of regulations that are impacting real lives. A gentleman in Pueblo, Colorado--they just had their new unemployment figures come out: 11.1 percent, and those are just the official numbers. The real numbers are even much higher. Jim Bartness, much to his dismay, contributed to that, simply because he tried to play by the rules that the government had issued. A small construction company, Mr. Bartness had had a few good years. In fact, under the President's proposals now, a couple of years ago he would be deemed as wealthy. What did he do with his wealth as a small business man, an LLC, a sole proprietorship? He reinvested those dollars right back into his business--to be able to create jobs, to be able to provide for his family. He paid down his line of credit to zero, kept a little bit of cushion to be able to get them through the tough times. In construction, if you're familiar with that, you often bid jobs but you don't get them.…”