John Tierney: “I continue to be amused by the railing on the other side of all this paperwork burden as if they did not understand that…”

“I continue to be amused by the railing on the other side of all this paperwork burden as if they did not understand that the cause of that was their own administration. The President ran on a platform of cutting back the regulatory burden on businesses; and if you go back in history during that period of time before 2000, you can see speech after speech telling us how terrible the paperwork burden was and what he was going to do to improve it. But the fact of the matter is if you look at the report done for the gentleman from California (Mr. Waxman) and for me, it states clearly, 'The annual paperwork hours today is over 700 million burden hours higher than it was when President Bush took office.' In the year 2000, it increased by 7.4 billion hours. In 2003 it went up to 8.1 billion hours. It is an increase of over 10 percent. The Internal Revenue Service accounts for more paperwork than any other Federal agency with 81 percent of the total paperwork burden hours. Yet that is exactly where most of the increases came. The largest sources of statutory increases in paperwork have been the recent tax law changes.”