John Tierney: “I think we are doing the exact right thing here today in passing this Small Business Paperwork Relief Act. But I would…”

“I think we are doing the exact right thing here today in passing this Small Business Paperwork Relief Act. But I would be remiss if I did not respond somewhat to a lot of the hyperbole that we have heard on the other side. Nobody wants small businesses to be overburdened with regulations, but certainly I think in the days of Enron and Global Crossing and Tyco and right on down the line, we can all appreciate the damage that has been done in the past couple of decades as we threw regulation after regulation away or loosened them to the point where some corporations, particularly large corporations, have sort of missed their mission and their responsibility to the American people. In that sense it calls upon government to have the kind of governance that we have always had in this country, and that is a balanced governance. It is a free market with the hand of government regulation balancing it. The obvious goal here is to strike that balance so it does not overburden business, but still protects the people in the way it should and the way they want it to protect them, whether it is about their health, about collecting taxes that are necessary for public goods and services or so on down the line.”