Hello, I’m Diane Black. In addition to being a nurse, I'm also a small business owner and I taught at a local community college. I’m also a proud mother of three and grandmother of six – all of them wonderful. Just two months ago today, I had the honor of being sworn-in to serve the people of Tennessee’s Sixth Congressional District, as part of the new Republican freshman class in the House of Representatives.
My colleagues and I in the freshman class know that we weren’t sent to Washington to sit on our hands, or to find new ways to avoid old problems. We were sent here by our constituents to help put an end to Washington's policies that are making it harder to create jobs and threatening our nation’s future.
Job creation has to be the number-one priority for both parties. The policies of the past haven’t worked, and despite some signs of life in our economy, the unemployment rate is still far above the levels that the president’s advisors promised when the ‘stimulus’ spending bill was signed into law.
What we need is a new approach – a path to prosperity that gets government out of the way by cutting unnecessary spending and removing barriers to job growth. We need to unleash our nation’s economy instead of burying it under a mountain of regulation, taxation and debt.
Since the moment we were sworn into office, this has been the focus of our new majority in the House.
Whenever I tour my district and I ask small businesspeople ‘what can I do to help?,’ they tell me to just get government out of the way and they’ll create the jobs and grow on their own.
That’s exactly why our new majority is taking a complete inventory of Washington's rules and regulations, looking to root out the ones that make it harder to create jobs.
We’re hoping to find things that could have been discovered if Washington had been doing its work in an open and transparent way. There’s no better example of this than the 1099 paperwork mandate in ObamaCare. The House passed a bill this week to repeal it.
And soon, we’re going to vote to cut wasteful mandatory spending programs – not just in ObamaCare, but also in the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill that’s drying up credit for our small businesses. We’ve also got our eye on EPA rules that are hurting job creation and creating higher gas prices.
It’s not just the overreaching that has to stop – it’s the overspending, which many economists agree is a barrier to job creation.
It’s now been just two weeks since the House passed H.R. 1, a bill that makes much-needed spending cuts and keeps the government running through the end of the fiscal year. Unfortunately, the Democrats who run the Senate haven’t allowed the vote on this bill or any other bill that would cut spending and keep the government running long-term.
You may have heard President Obama say that we need to make sure ‘we're living within our means.’ He’s right about that. Unfortunately, his budget doesn’t match his words. It continues out-of-control spending, it adds to our $14 trillion debt, and it adds to the uncertainty that makes it harder to create jobs. Maintaining the status quo – and refusing to offer a credible plan to cut spending – is just unacceptable and inexcusable.
Again, we weren’t sent here to sit on our hands. The American people want us to keep the government running while cutting its cost. So with your support, Republicans spearheaded the passage of a short-term measure that cuts spending by $4 billion.
That’s $4 billion of YOUR money that would otherwise have gone to earmarks and other wasteful programs. It’s a start, but it’s not nearly enough. By enacting this bill, we’ve provided another two weeks for our Democrat colleagues in the Senate to either pass H.R. 1, or to pass a credible alternative that meets the people’s priorities. Doing nothing is not an option.
After two years, we know that government doesn’t create private-sector jobs. It’s small businesses and the people behind them who do. That’s why our majority is focused on getting government out of the way and charting a new path to prosperity. It’s what our constituents sent us here to do, and it’s what we need to do for the future of our children and our country. Thank you for listening. ####
RELATED:
Weekly remarks: Sen. Portman says spending must be cut; Obama sees need for investments
Weekly remarks: Obama on the future; Tom Price says spending binge must stop
Weekly remarks: GOP's Hatch says U.S. cannot afford such spending; Obama calls it investing
Weekly remarks: Obama sees new jobs; GOP's Hensarling says spending must be cut
Weekly remarks: Ron Johnson on oversized government; Obama on more clean energy
Weekly remarks: Obama on economic truths; John Barrasso on healthcare repeal
Weekly remarks: Both Jeff Flake and Obama take heart in Tucson spirit
Don't miss any of these weekly speeches. Click here for Twitter alerts of each new Ticket item. Or follow us @latimestot. Our Facebook Like page is over here. Also available on Kindle now. ReTweet or forward this item on Twitter, Facebook, etc. with the buttons down below.
Photos: Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times; Emily Michot / MCT (Bush and Obama, March 4, 2011); Manuel Balce Ceneta / Associated Press; Jason Reed / Reuters (Black).
Like some of you, I have an uncle who likes forwarding emails that feature quotations, random slide shows and holiday alerts. Mind you, since we have a lot of holidays and festivals in India, these emails are frequent. Still, it is fun to hear from him (mostly because I love him). Recently, he emailed me an old folk tale.
According to the story, a farmer has a donkey, which falls into a well. The donkey starts braying, forcing the farmer to look for ways to figure out what to do. His conclusion? Since the donkey is old, it’s not worth the effort to retrieve the donkey.
He starts shoveling dirt into the well. The donkey has an “oh-crikey” moment and it starts crying and creating a fuss. But then, it quiets down. With every few shovels of dirt, the donkey re-adjusts, shakes dirt off his back, and stands up. Before the farmer knew it, the donkey was out of the wall.
This old folklore has a simple lesson: When life pours dirt on you, shake it off and move forward. This lesson is particularly true for start-ups that have to face their moment of truth.
Game On
I was reminded of this story when I was transcribing my interview with Neil Young, CEO and co-founder of mobile video games start-up, ngmoco (acquired by Japan’s DeNA for $403 million.) Young and I have talked off and on, and before he sold his company, he and I discussed the change of direction he made for the company.
Neil shared with me the story of how, when facing a near impossible business environment, he had to find a new business model for his company, which started life building premium mobile games. It sold a lot of games!
To the outside world, ngmoco was a massive success, but Young knew the harsh facts: the games had a very short half-life and they lost money-making potential once they fell out of the top ten or after the initial couple of weeks.
Young argues that for a company making premium mobile games, the company would have to have two games in the top five paid games on the iPhone store for 365 days for the company to build a $10 million a year business.
Even if you added Android platform opportunities, ngmoco was still in a hit-driven business. With new free (and paid) apps launching every day, Young & Co. knew that it would be difficult to keep on the hit trail. Moreover, the average price of the games was decaying fast and settling at around 99 cents. The ad-based revenue stream wasn’t going to be enough, as the eCPMs were pretty low. Like the donkey, ngmoco was in a well, with no likelihood of coming out.
However, upon closer scrutiny, Young’s team realized they had a lot of games, which had very high engagement and user loyalty. “Games are not built for a fleeting moment in the charts, but are built for an (ongoing) relationship with the customer, “ he says. “The longer you can maintain that relationship, the longer the opportunity.”
Armed with this knowledge, ngmoco started the Plus+ network (its social gaming network), and embraced the Freemium model that eventually led to the company increasing its revenues and later selling out to DeNA.
All Chips In
Young isn’t the first corporate honcho who made tough decisions. Intel Corp., the company we chip-heads affectionately refer to as Chipzilla, was the proverbial donkey in the well in 1983, when it was getting killed in the market by Japanese memory chip makers.
The company had been dabbling in the microprocessor business, supplying chips to the likes of IBM, but the majority of its revenues came from the sales of memory chips, primarily dynamic random access memory (DRAM).
Andy Grove, then-president of Intel (and later its CEO and chairman) made a crucial decision: Forget the memory chips and gamble it all on becoming the single source of microprocessors for the PC industry. His decision came at a time when it wasn’t clear what PC standards were going to prevail, or if the 8086 processor was going to catch on. The rest is history.
And the Story Goes…
Richard Tedlow, a professor at Harvard, in his book, Denial: Why Business Leaders Fail to Look Facts in the Face and What To Do About It once wrote: “Denial is the unconscious calculus that if an unpleasant reality were true, it would be too terrible, so therefore cannot be true… In fact, denial might be the biggest and potentially most ruinous problem that businesses face, from start-ups to mature, powerful corporations.”
Nokia’s denial of the existence of the iPhone and the disruptive impact on its business is a good example. Young of ngmoco could have accepted the short-term success of his company, but instead he decided not to.
I have seen many a startups (and many a founder) spend most of its energies bemoaning its miseries, instead of trying to do something about it. But like the proverbial donkey, the decision is yours to make.
Around the Web
- Niall Ferguson: Americans and Revolutions
- Scott Olsen: DST & Y Combinator: A (VC) Industry in transition
- Brandon Watson: Why developers shouldn’t listen to Scoble
bench craft company reviews
Iranian Video Says Mahdi is 'Near' - World - CBN <b>News</b> - Christian <b>...</b>
New evidence has emerged that the Iranian government sees the current unrest in the Middle East as a signal that the Mahdi--or Islamic messiah--is about to appear.
New Company Promises to Give You a Pretend Facebook Girlfriend
Your relationship troubles are over with the help of Cloud Girlfriend, a new startup that creates virtual girlfriends for social media like Facebook.
Out This Week – 01/04/2011 <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
Read our news of Out This Week – 01/04/2011. ... Latest Videos. Shift 2 trailer gears up for launch [5] 25 March, 2011. Latest News. Shift 2: Unleashed delayed by a week [16]. Shift 2: Unleashed nets Pagani Huayra [19] ...
No comments:
Post a Comment