Long before I was elected into public office I was a small business owner. My very first business I created was the age of 20. It was a small deli in the city of Bakersfield, California. With every business I had I learned three lessons: As a small business owner you’re the first one to work, you’re the last one to leave, and you’re the last one to be paid. It was hard work, but it was rewarding to provide a good product to your neighbors.
But there’s one other lesson that I learned, and one that I feared the most. And it came from Washington. It was a faceless, nameless bureaucrat that could change the direction of my business, that wasn’t listening, and could not hear. You know, year after year, that’s what bureaucrats do behind us inside the Department of Labor. If you just look in the short time frame: overtime rule tying down the employees that we want to give flexibility to, or fiduciary limiting the financial advice others could actually have, or silica just adding massive cost to the builders. And that’s just one department here in Washington.
You know, small businesses and the millions of people they employ, they aren’t the enemies. They’re not the enemies to be regulated. They’re good people and they deserve government to serve them, not run them out of business.
Now, the members of this task force took a look at every aspect, but they kept in mind that small business—that individual that wants to create something maybe in a garage that could even build into something bigger. And the American people need those jobs. They need better pay. They need opportunities to increase their skill, provide for themselves and their families. They want to make their lives a little better than the day before.
Each and every regulation produced in Washington should have those goals in mind, and if it fails to produce those results, we just shouldn’t have it. That’s why the people across America should have a voice. And that voice—they lend that power every two years to their representative in Congress, not to a faceless bureaucrat that thinks they know better, that never been into a sandwich shop and know how to run it. They weren’t there the first one to work, the last one to leave, and last one to be paid. Let their voices be heard, and that’s a better way for America.