Political Quotes

“Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate that recognition, and I appreciate the input that has come from the gentlelady from North Carolina. I came down here to change the subject, but I wanted to speak about regulation, and I'll just wrap up those thoughts that I had before the clock ticked down and take it over to this. As I emerged into the construction business that I identified, I found myself doing seminars with other people of the same profession around the five-State area in the upper Midwest with our trade association, the Land Improvement Contractors of America. In that five- State area as I traveled around and held those seminars, I began to ask the questions of self-employed people. Most of them had started the business themselves, and they were employers doing this in the kind of way that we need to encourage more Americans to do rather than discourage them with regulation. I began to ask them, How many agencies regulate your trade? As I asked that question, there might be 60 to 70 contractors in a room, and we would begin to write down the names of those agencies. And, yes, some of them were divisions within the agencies. You can start with the IRS and the EPA and you go on and on and on. OSHA, the mine regulators. It continues on. But we came to this number of our little narrow trade group, 43 different agencies that regulate us. And we needed to know the regulations from 43 different agencies.…”