On the recordNovember 30, 2011
Even though I'm a freshman in this body, I have been working hard to try to find metrics by which I can judge what's happening here because this body is not like so much that happens back home. The metric that I have found while we're debating a rule is that the less folks are talking about the rule, I think the better job we did crafting it. I think that's right. Because if it was an awful rule, we'd spend our time talking about what an awful rule it is. When it's a pretty good rule, we spend our time talking about other issues on the floor. I happen to agree with my friend from New Jersey. A thousand dollars for a family earning $50,000, that's real money. Now, I would say, though, to my friend from Massachusetts that if you take that $1.75 trillion burden that the Small Business Administration tells us is upon the American people because of regulations, that's actually $5,000 per person. That's $15,000 per a three-member family. And so yes, I agree with my friend from New Jersey that we should absolutely cooperate on focusing on those burdens. The burden we're focusing on today? Even larger, by orders of magnitude.
