GOP Freshmen Hour: The Importance of Small Business in America

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHILLING. I thank the gentlewoman from North Carolina for inviting me to participate today.

The best thing about having the opportunity to represent the residents of Illinois' 17th District is the ability to just listen to their concerns and then taking those concerns back here to Washington, D.C.

As I travel throughout the area, I listen, and I am also asked what worries me. I worry about unemployment and about the uncertainty facing our families in our district. I am worried that more is not being done to create an environment of certainty that promotes long-term growth in our jobs sector.

Government does not create jobs. We need to be clear about that. Government creates an environment for job creation by the private sector. Folks simply will not be put back to work if government continues villainizing our job creators and enacting policies that keep workers on the unemployment lines and drive us deeper into debt. As a small business owner myself, I understand how this hinders the ability to create jobs.

Back in August, I invited local business owners throughout our area to participate in a business roundtable where we discussed what government can do to empower the private sector, spur job creation, and grow our economy. These business owners are the people we are asking to lead us into economic recovery and to put Americans back to work.

I was pleased to see folks from all sorts of industries present eager and great ideas and thoughts on issues that basically are causing them to struggle in this economy. They shared with me that the high energy costs, rising taxes, mixed messages from Washington, D.C., and the uncertainty from the Illinois State government are stifling the creation of an environment of economic success.

Now, there are more than 27 million small businesses throughout the United States of America. They are the lifeblood of our Nation's economy. America's small businesses create 7 out of every 10 new jobs, and they employ over half the country's private-sector workforce. We ought to be making it easier for these folks to grow and hire new workers, not villainizing them or burdening them with a broken Tax Code, unnecessary mandates, high energy costs, and uncertainty. We need to tear down the roadblocks, get government out of the way and lay the groundwork for real private-sector job creation.

Phil Nelson, president of the Illinois Farm Bureau, recently testified before the Small Business Committee.

He said, ``What really keeps me lying awake at night is the potential for more regulatory creep. It's as if we go to bed one night with one set of regulations and wake up the next morning facing a new set. Every moment that we spend fighting and then working to comply with needless, duplicative regulations takes us away from what we do best--producing food.''

My colleagues and I in the House have been focused on jobs since day one--passing more than 20 jobs bills to give small businesses the certainty they need to grow, increasing the domestic production of oil and getting Americans back to work. Unfortunately, these bills remain stuck in the Senate, but we cannot do it alone. The President and the Senate Democrats must join us.

This week, we will be voting on H.R. 527, the Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act. This is yet another pro-jobs bill, one that helps address the problem of burdensome, reckless regulations that burden businesses and stunt job growth. The Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act provides urgently needed help to small businesses facing an onslaught of Federal regulations. When considering regulations, agencies frequently fail to consider alternative ways to achieve the regulatory goals without imposing unnecessary burdens on America's job creators. This bill increases the ability of small businesses to provide input to Federal agencies as they consider government regulations, and it gives the Small Business Administration new authority to ensure agencies comply with a law that requires flexibility in taking regulatory action against small business.

It takes President Obama's regulatory review Executive order one step further, giving the Small Business Administration the ability to ensure new regulations are in compliance with the law while verifying that small businesses will be able to comply without hurting their ability to create jobs.

Business owners need the certainty that government will get out of the way so that they can do what they do best, which is to grow their businesses and create jobs, and the American people need real bipartisan solutions to our jobs crisis.

Let's put politics and partisanship aside and help the private sector create the jobs that Americans throughout the country so desperately need. The time has come to empower small businesses and to reduce government barriers by helping our small businesses, by fixing the Tax Code to help our job creators, by boosting competitiveness for American manufacturers, by encouraging entrepreneurship and growth, by maximizing American energy production, by paying down America's unsustainable debt burden, and by starting to live within our means.

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