I like this....I really like this!
I have not yet "declared" for ANY of the Presidential candidates. It should be rather obvious that I won't be voting for any of the Democratic candidates (although if I HAD to settle for one, I'd probably pick either Biden or Dodd -> at least that are not openly socialists).
On the Republican side, the only person in my house that has made a decision is TMEW - she has decided for Rudy. Thus, she thought this from NRO was rather amusing:
Rudy, Nixon, and the Toilets at Yankee Stadium [Peter Robinson]
Traveling over the last few days, I’ve only just caught up with the Corner. May I add a note to the Giuliani versus Nixon thread?
Richard Nixon gave us a rich profusion of federal bureaucrats and regulations, creating, to note just one of innumerable items, OHSA, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. Below, Rudy Giuliani on such bureaucrats and regulations. (The passage, which is drawn from an interview I conducted with Rudy while he was still mayor of New York City, comes from It’s My Party, a book I published in 2000. Used copies, I burst with pride to note, now command a penny apiece.)
As I was about to leave his office, Mayor Giuliani said there was something he wanted me to see. He stood, walked to his desk, riffled among some papers for a moment, then found what he wanted and picked it up. He showed me a bound report. “This is hilarious,” Giuliani said. “You’ll love it.”
The federal government, he explained, had just conducted a study of Yankee Stadium, checking it for accessibility to the disabled. The inspectors had found some three thousand instances in which Yankee Stadium failed to meet federal standards.
"Listen to this stuff,” Giuliani said. He read one item after another. The path of travel out of the Yankee dugout was accessible only by steps, not a ramp, making it impossible to get a wheelchair onto the field. The dressing bench in the Yankee locker room was forty-five inches long by sixteen inches deep instead of the required forty-eight inches long by twenty-four inches deep. The toilets in the locker room had a seat heat of sixteen inches, one inch below the required seventeen inches. The spout of the drinking fountain in the weight room was forty-two inches off the floor instead of the required thirty-six inches.
"The urinals are too high,” Giuliani continued, laughing...
“The toilet paper dispenser is incorrectly mounted on the back wall of the toilet. Do you believe anybody does this? I mean, people get paid to do this.”
Giuliani tossed the report back onto the desk.
"The federal government sent people here from Washington to do this. This is the stupidity they use. They are pointy-headed stupid morons. This is ridiculous! This is ridiculous!”
For a while, TMEW and I ran a daycare - talk about silly regulations! For instance, the State inspector cited us for not having a thermometer in a freezer - that was unused. Now to be fair, there were some that were advocates - here's where you are lacking, can you fix this, here's the impact. Others - check mark - you're screwed. One was a help, the other a gotcha.
Small businesses everywhere have to face this same nonsense day after day after day, costing lots of time, money and angst. While many of these regs were first to set up to solve real problems, they morph into silliness (think our missing thermometer) and are, in my estimation, used to justify body / staff headcounts.
If Rudy has continued along in this vein, this would make me a happy camper. Taxes hurt a lot of small business....not only the actual money but the time spent in record keeping and compliance work. BUT! Adhering, especially when the owners WANT to comply with regulations ("we want to do things right!"), takes a lot of time. And often, getting caught between competing and completely opposed regulations is extremely frustrating.
If he's willing to cut regulations that do not make sense as well as his promise to to cut taxes....well...
I'm thinking.....real hard, real hard....
Comments
Posted by: NH | July 28, 2007 5:49 PM
Posted by: NH | July 28, 2007 5:53 PM