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Mr. KING of Iowa. Will the gentlelady yield?

Mrs. ELLMERS. I yield to my colleague from Iowa.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentlelady from North Carolina for yielding, and I especially thank her for leading in this Special Order hour here tonight to discuss the burden of regulation on business in this country, primarily the burden on small businesses in America.

From my standpoint and my background, I started a business in 1975. I remember the fears I had at the time. I knew I could do the work and I knew I could line up the customers. I believed I could turn a cash flow, but I didn't know that I could comply with all government regulations. And little did I know how much I was actually stepping into.

When you begin to enter into a business, you are stepping into the unknown. That unknown turned out to be that I would find out about a government agent after a government agent, one after another. They would show up. They'd send me a little mailer. They would talk to someone else in my business. They would say: Did you meet this one? Did you meet that regulation? Do you have your MSD requirements there? What about the EPA side of this? Do you know you have to post a sign that says that you're an equal opportunity employer. And by the way, that has to be in multiple languages. And in case someone shows up that doesn't speak that language, you may have another regulation to provide that interpreter that's there.

On and on and on it went. More and more of my time went away from producing goods and services that had a marketable value, and instead it was invested in complying with primarily Federal but also State regulations.

So as the years went by, I got better at it. I found out more and more to comply with, and I got greater and greater frustration within me because of this burden of filing reports, meeting deadlines, and making sure that the government bureaucrats had all of their regulations and all of the paperwork that they wanted, all the while, ``To what purpose?'' was my question, because much of that paperwork that I was filling out was going off in some storage dungeon somewhere never to be seen again unless there was some type of litigation or regulation enforcement against me, in which case then I was confident that they would go dig it up out of the dungeon and pull up that paperwork to see if I dotted the i's and crossed the t's. But what good did it do? What good did most of that regulation do if it simply was going to go off somewhere to go into storage so if, God forbid we had an accident on the job site and OSHA would come in, they would want to make sure that I had all of my regulations in place? But that wouldn't make us more safe, the paperwork would not.

I made a comment here in the Judiciary Committee a month or so ago that of all of these regulations that we have to comply with, if you look across America, there are some really good companies in this country. Of all of them, thousands and thousands of companies in America, hundreds of thousands--actually, millions of companies in America altogether. They advertise everything under the sun that you can imagine. They have banners on their Web site. They will tell you that they are the best or first at--you name anything it is you want. Put it in the Google search. You'll find an American company that will provide it for you, and they'll advertise their quality. They'll advertise their personnel. They'll advertise the efficiency and the cost. It will go on and on and on. But there isn't a single company in America, not one, Mr. Speaker, that has a little banner on their Web site that says, ``We are in compliance with all Federal regulations.'' Not one single company takes that position, and I'll tell you why: because they know if they ever advertise that they are in compliance, there would be a Federal bureaucrat that represented an agency, or two or more, or up to 682, according to the Constitution Daily Web site, Federal agencies--and those are subdepartments and divisions, regulatory entities, 682 of them, and this count is about 5 years old, by the way--that can levy sanction actions against American businesses.

And so the number one fear I had was: Can I comply with all of these regulations? Can I identify them? Can I comply with them? And what do I do about the conflicting regulations where, if you meet one regulation, the other regulation contradicts it? You're bound to be in violation.

So today there isn't a single company in America that advertises that they are in compliance with all Federal regulations. And if they did, I think we should give them the Doo Dah of the Year Award for that because they would be surrounded by bureaucrats, Federal regulators that are in there to inspect, to make sure that they are completely in compliance.

And, by the way, they have to justify their job. So I would predict that any company that would announce that they are in compliance with all Federal regulations probably wouldn't survive beyond about 18 months before they went into bankruptcy because they would be tied up in knots and tied down and they couldn't produce those goods and services that have a marketable value.

Now, there is a tradeoff on this always, and it doesn't mean that we should not have wise regulations. Yes, we should. But they need to keep in mind the regulatory burden of those rules and what it does to slow down production.

Now, I've said goods and services that have a marketable valuable both domestically and abroad. That means, if you run a company, you want to go to work every day, and you look around, what do we do? We produce a product. We manufacture and market a widget. And you want to do that as efficiently as possible. So if you put 100 people out there on the factory floor to manufacture widgets, and it doesn't take but one person to run payroll and answer mail, you're in pretty good shape. You've got one of those 100 people that's tied up doing administrative duties, that's pretty good efficiency. That's 99 percent producing that product, that number one, grade A widget that you're manufacturing and perhaps invented.

But as soon as a bureaucrat comes along and says,

Wait a minute. You have to have somebody here that's documenting--let's say the water that's coming in, the electricity that's coming in, the sewage that's going out. You have to have safety inspectors and you have to have safety meetings, so that once a week you line everybody up and spend 15 to 30 minutes telling them what they need to do, which is safe. Not a bad idea, but when the government calls for that, they put more on your overhead and they've shut down the production of that entire plant for that period of time that they prescribe.

And the other regulations that come along in our construction businesses, the Federal Government saying, let's see, you have to pay the Federal Government scale for your equipment operators on construction projects, Davis-Bacon wage scale. That really means union-imposed scale on those projects. And it might change the wages. In the past, I've seen them double or be cut in half, depending which direction you're going. Just going across the highway, you go into a different division and it's a whole different wage scale. The guy running the shovel gets a different wage than the guy that's running the grease gun, different from the guy that's running the machine that's being greased or having the track scooped out on it. And I have to keep track of all of that and do what the government tells me, which means not just is it costly to keep track of it all, but it consumes the efficiency on the project. It makes it difficult, if not impossible.

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