Ohio Senate Candidate Mandel: Federal Regulations Crippling Small Businesses

The ever-increasing web of regulation coming from Washington is crippling small businesses and forcing them to choose between hiring compliance officers and workers, Ohio State Treasurer and U.S. Senate candidate Josh Mandel tells Newsmax.TV.

Mandel, who won the Ohio GOP primary and will take on Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, in the fall, said the country needs to undertake “sweeping regulatory reform.”

“Unfortunately, the U.S. EPA and many other agencies at the federal level have created so many layers of regulation that it’s putting small businesses out of business,” he said. “Over half, well over half, of the jobs in America are in small businesses. And a lot of these small businesses cannot afford to hire armies and armies of accountants and attorneys and compliance officers.

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“When Washington passes many layers of unnecessary regulation, it puts out of work the small-business employee and the small-business owner. We need to reverse that trend. These larger companies throughout America, they could afford to hire armies of compliance officers and lawyers and accountants and what not. It’s the small-business owner that has to make a decision between hiring five more lawyers to do regulatory compliance or hiring five more men or women to put on the floor of their manufacturing plant to actually produce products that can be sold throughout America and throughout the world. That’s going to be one of my priorities.”

Mandel, 34, who has been compared with another young conservative, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., has a tough road ahead in his battle with the incumbent Brown, who consistently has held a double-digit lead over the former Marine in polls. However, he is not deterred.

“He’ll still be beating us in the polls probably through the summer, maybe even into the early fall,” Mandel said. “The only poll we care about is Election Day and on Election Day, we’re going to win. He has an advantage in that he’s got great name ID. His name ID, his name recognition, is in the mid-90s. He also has a significant disadvantage in that everyone knows who he is but still less than half the people want to rehire him. Our challenge, our main obstacle, is building up our name recognition, getting known throughout the state of Ohio.”

Mandel believes that Brown’s greatest liability is his record.

“He cast the deciding vote on the federal government’s takeover of healthcare,” he noted. “That vote on Obamacare will insert federal bureaucrats between us and our physicians. We want to make our own healthcare decisions. We want to work on those decisions with our doctors, not with some faceless bureaucrat in Washington.

“Not to mention our opponent, while he voted for it, he really held his nose because he didn’t feel it went far enough. He wanted a complete, public healthcare and he wants to take America down the path of European and Canadian-style healthcare where, unfortunately, in countries like that you see the results. Where they socialize healthcare you see people waiting in line a lot longer, you see the quality going down, and, just in general, people are not as happy with their healthcare access or quality.”

Mandel charged that Brown also supported recent decisions to seal off Ohio land from oil and gas exploration and helped rack up the national debt.

“I believe if families and small businesses have to balance their budgets, the federal government should do the same thing. … We’re running against a guy who actually campaigned on a balanced budget in 2006, when he ran for the Senate,” Mandel said. “He did TV ads talking about a balanced budget amendment and now he mocks the idea of passing any budget, let alone a balanced budget. He actually, last year, voted against the balanced budget amendment.”

Mandel promised that if elected he would make a balanced budget amendment a priority no matter who stands in the way.

“I’ll stand up to the Republican leaders the same that I’ve stood up to Democratic leaders,” he said. “I don’t care. I have the backbone to stand up to Democrats, Republicans, and independents — and people who have a lot of power and money — to do the right thing to move the ball down the field economically in our country. And if that means standing up to Republican Party bosses to pass a balanced budget amendment, so be it. I’ll do that in a second.”

On other issues, Mandel said:

• The Senate needs leaders who will put country before party to solve the dysfunction that led Maine’s Olympia Snowe to retire. “It’s important that people are principled first and they are looking at their country and their constituents first and party second. That’s one of the problems in Washington; that there’s too much blind allegiance to party.”
• He disagrees with the “fire sale” President Barack Obama “executed when he just pulled the troops out of Iraq like he did. I agree we need to take the training wheels off and we can’t stay in those countries forever, but to do it like he did was just irresponsible. And to be providing dates certain to the enemy is irresponsible as well.”