Small Business and Regulatory Burdens

Just today, I learned that left-wing groups are launching a smear campaign against Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

According to Politico, they’re “leaving no stone unturned in digging into Issa’s personal and business history,” an obsessiveness that obviously reveals their anxiety about what he could accomplish. In fact, their explicit purpose is to “make life difficult for Issa and sow seeds of doubt on his investigations.”

For a number of reasons, they feel that they have to slow down his investigations.  Now.

This all begs the question of why they feel so threatened by Issa’s good government advocacy.  On Thursday, February 10, 2011, Issa’s Committee held a hearing entitled, “Regulatory Impediments to Job Creation,” during which small business owners and advocates testified about the regulatory strangleholds on their businesses.  Specifically, witnesses included representatives from the Black Chamber of Commerce, the Western Growers Association, and the National Association of Manufacturers. Liberals, moderates, and conservatives all claim to be in support of job creation, so what was so dangerous about these hearings?

In preparation for the hearings, Chairman Issa requested that small business owners send him their accounts of unreasonable regulatory burdens and they way in which those burdens harm their businesses. This way, the public learns about these burdens from the business owners themselves — not from politicians.

When I checked the Committee’s website this morning, I counted more than 2,000 pages of  correspondence from small business owners about the unintended consequences of different federal regulations.

(See their letters here and here.)

Here are some highlights from the comments:

- Due to regulations, small pharmacists are “struggling with prescription filling fees of $.50, $1.25, $1.40, etc. above cost and are forced to fill several prescription a day below [their] true acquisition cost — often costing [them] $15-$20 in time to try to retrieve $3 or $4 to bring Rxs above acquisition costs.”

- T&D Charters is “on the brink of closing down” because of the federal government’s Catch Shares policy.

-  From another fishing charter company: “the last thing the federal government should be doing in these economic times is spending millions of taxpayer dollars to expand a policy [Catch Shares] that will put even more Americans out of work”

- Another business owner writes that “[t]he FDA seized a shipment of my company’s products on 01/11/2010 (value over $100,000.00) without any reason given in writing.”  He is still waiting for this letter from the FDA.

- The owner of Weiland Sliding Doors and Windows faces constant “difficulties with the Fish & Game who block [her] request to have adequate annual maintenance of the creekbed along [her] property line, preventing [her] business…from being flooded each year!”

- For Garden Isle Vacations in Hawaii, the tax burden is almost 14% off the top and this does not even include their costs for rental car fees or fuel costs.

- One former dry cleaning owner sold his business 38 years ago — when “no regulations existed” about “dry cleaning solvent vapors” but is currently being sued for millions of dollars because those vapors were recently found in the ground.

I encourage you to visit those links and read more — hundreds, even thousands of more — stories for yourselves.

These are the stories of real, job-creating entrepreneurial Americans who are bold enough to stand up and speak about the harm of federal regulatory burdens.  How could this be threatening to anyone who actually wants to put Americans back to work?