With the people of our country facing serious financial challenges, our Chattanooga-area member of Congress, Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, had some sound advice when he spoke Wednesday at a business leader roundtable at the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce.
Fleischmann specified four urgent goals: gaining stability in the marketplace, reducing government regulation, confronting the heavy influence of unions and simplifying the federal tax code.
Properly dealing with those issues will "help businesses grow, expand the workforce and produce more capital," the congressman said.
Those are things all of us should desire. Yet Fleischmann noted some of the negative effects of Barack Obama's pursuit of big-government policies:
• Employment of government regulators has increased 13 percent, while private-sector employment has been dropping.
• Federal regulations are costing U.S. taxpayers $38 billion per year.
• And the administration is endangering job creation with the threat to punish companies that locate jobs in right-to-work states.
"In our current fiscal crisis, we must take steps to decrease our national debt and put Americans back to work," Fleischmann said.
"A logical first step is to reduce regulatory burdens and produce an environment where we give businesses the opportunity to do what they do best: create jobs."
Fleischmann said the federal tax code needs to be improved by closing loopholes, reducing top marginal tax rates and simplifying the tax code.
"Each year," the congressman said, "over 6 billion hours of work and $160 billion are spent to understand and comply with the tax code. Taxes are a burden in themselves, and the process of compliance should not be an additional burden. Simplification is essential. Creating fewer brackets with lower individual rates would allow people to keep more of the money they earn."
Fleischmann wants to reduce the federal deficit, create a fairer tax structure and repeal ObamaCare and the Dodd-Frank Act, which imposes a range of onerous financial regulations. Both are having a negative impact on our economy.
Accordingly, Fleischmann is right to call for their repeal and for reining in the federal government overall.