Todd Tiahrt: “I believe that the content of this amendment should be a part of the debate that we are having on every agency that we…”

“I believe that the content of this amendment should be a part of the debate that we are having on every agency that we are going to fund this year through the Federal budget. Over the last generation, this government has made this country less and less competitive through the regulatory process. If you look to last year, last year we had a $670 billion trade deficit. Our Federal budget deficit grew and we saw a lot of outsourcing of jobs. Well, if you combine that with what we are seeing happen across the world, pointed out by Thomas Friedman in his book ``The World is Flat,'' China is graduating 350,000 engineers every year. India is graduating 80,000 software engineers. They are attempting to create an Asian Union, which would be an economy of about 3 billion people. The world is becoming more and more competitive, and part of the reason that we are becoming less and less competitive, part of the reason why we are seeing this trade deficit is because of our regulatory process. But it just does not stop there. We also have problems with litigation, and we need to reform our system because right now the lawsuits are driving up the cost of American products. A good example of how this could change is when common sense limits are put on litigation, such as the statute of repose, where the aircraft industry accepted through the legislation common sense limits on liability and 4,000 jobs were created the very next year. We could apply that to other industries.…”