Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on much these days. But we do agree that Congress must do something about this nation’s unemployment crisis.

With 14 million Americans out of work, there is no more pressing issue facing Congress or the country.

Democrats’ plan to address this problem has been straightforward. We have advocated for policies that will create jobs by investing in what makes this country great – our infrastructure, our education system and our innovative workforce.

Despite Republican obstructionism, we have continued to fight for middle-class jobs, bringing to the Senate floor bill after bill designed to put Americans back to work.

Republicans have taken a different approach. They have advocated a wholesale repeal of so-called “job-killing regulations.”

They say rolling back everything from limits on air pollution to rules that keep our worksites safe will create jobs and revive our economy. The problem is, that’s just not true.

Business leaders and economists of every political stripe agree this GOP mantra is an utter falsehood.

A respected economic advisor to two Republican presidents called this myth – spread by Republicans to cover up their woeful lack of a plan to create jobs – “nonsense” and “made up.”

In fact, evidence show that government safeguards have little impact on employment.

A Bureau of Labor Statistics study found that last year only three tenths of one percent of layoffs was caused by regulation. That’s according to the executives who ordered those layoffs.

Nearly 85 times as many jobs were lost last year because of a slow economy.

But rather than work with us to turn that weak economy around, Republicans have spent 11 months fighting Democratic policies that would have created millions of jobs.

Meanwhile, they’ve spent those 11 months focused on killing safety protections that cost a few thousand jobs a year while saving literally hundreds of thousands of lives.

For example, Republicans want to halt updates to the Clear Air Act. Since its passage 40 years ago, this law has reduced emission of key pollutants by 70 percent while the economy has grown by 200 percent.

Long-planned updates to the law would reduce emissions of mercury, acid gases and other life-threatening pollutants into the air, saving lives.

Last year alone, the Clear Air Act saved the lives of more than 160,000 Americans. It prevented 86,000 emergency room visits and 13 million lost work days.

The Clear Air Act has prevented hundreds of thousands of cases of heart disease, chronic bronchitis and asthma.

And last year alone it saved American companies and consumers $1.3 trillion by reducing medical costs and increasing productivity.

Of course, all these benefits come with a price tag. But for every dollar spent complying with the Clean Air Act, this nation saves $30 in emergency room bills, lost work days and environmental cleanup.

And repealing this law wouldn’t make the costs go away – instead it would shift them from corporations to consumers.

Complying with environmental safeguards is one of the costs of doing business in the United States. It’s part of being a good corporate citizen.

That’s why two-thirds of voters say scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency – not politicians in Congress – should set pollution standards.

Seventy-one percent of voters, including a majority of Republicans, support the stronger environmental protections under attack by Congressional Republicans.

Eighty percent of voters believe those safeguards will improve public health and air quality.

There’s plenty of evidence that smart, fair regulations save lives and save consumers money.

There’s plenty more evidence that stronger watchdogs could have prevented disasters like the 2008 financial crisis or the West Virginia mining accident that killed 29 people last year.

Simply repeating the fiction that regulations kill jobs doesn’t make it fact.

But even if there was an ounce of truth in the fable, there are many ways to steer our economy out of the ditch and create jobs that don’t risk American lives.

Washington, D.C. – Nevada Senator Harry Reid made the following remarks today on the Senate floor regarding the Republican-propagated myth of “job-killing regulations.” Below are his remarks as prepared for delivery:

It’s impossible to open a newspaper or watch cable news these days without hearing my Republican colleagues talk about the evils of “job-killing regulations.”

Each day they arrive on the Senate floor to rail against the safeguards that keep our water clean, our air fresh and our mines safe.

According to the GOP, those safeguards are actually the source of all this nation’s economic woes – these horrible, time consuming government regulations that hinder the economic progress of America.

The Republicans would have you believe that the common-sense rules that check the greed of Wall Street banks, keep huge corporations honest and stop Big Oil’s unnecessary risk taking are also causing small businesses great harm.

Indeed, that would be a terrible thing – that is, if it were true.

While it’s proper to guard against and remove onerous regulations, my Republican friends have yet to produce a single shred of evidence that the regulations they hate so much do the broad economic harms they claim. That’s because there is none.

Conversely, there’s plenty of evidence to prove those regulations save lives, prevent asthma attacks and ensure Mom and Pops face a fair fight against multinational corporations and moneyed interest groups.

And there’s plenty of evidence to prove that disasters like the BP oil spill and the financial crisis of 2008 could have been prevented by stronger government watchdogs.

But Republicans aren’t relying on evidence as they propagate the myth of the job-killing regulation. They’re relying on repetition.

Bruce Bartlett, an advisor to President Ronald Reagan and a Treasury official under President George H.W. Bush, is a trusted, conservative voice on economics. He offered these strong words  on the regulation monster under Big Business’ bed:

“No hard evidence is offered for this claim; it is simply asserted as self-evident and repeated endlessly throughout the conservative echo chamber… In my opinion, regulatory uncertainty is a canard invented by Republicans that allows them to use current economic problems to pursue an agenda supported by the business community year in and year out. In other words, it is a simple case of political opportunism, not a serious effort to deal with high unemployment.”

But why use regulations proven to protect the health of every man, woman and child in this nation as a scapegoat? What are the origins of the myth?

I believe – as Bartlett does – that Republicans are attacking regulation because they don’t have a plan to create jobs and turn our economy around.

While Democrats have been pushing time-tested remedies for a flagging economy, such as infrastructure investments or middle-class tax cuts, our Republican colleagues have been peddling a cure-all tonic of deregulation.

Bartlett says, “People are increasingly concerned about unemployment, but Republicans have nothing to offer them.”

They’ve offered up the specter of overreaching government regulation to distract from the fact that they haven’t offered a single idea for how to put America back to work.

And they use the argument to justify rolling back everything from clear air and water safeguards to Wall Street and health insurance industry reforms.

What’s more, they’ve spread the tall tale that removing these regulations and letting Big Business do exactly as it pleases will not only prevent job losses, but actually create new jobs.

Bartlett called that logical leap “nonsense.”

“It’s just made up,” he said. So, let’s talk fact, not fiction.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which asks executives why they downsized, only a tiny fraction of layoffs have anything at all to do with tighter regulation.

Last year, only three tenths of one percent of people who lost their jobs were let go principally because of government regulation or intervention. On the other hand, a quarter of them were laid off because of lack of business.

And in a recent survey by the Small Business Majority, only 13% of small business owners cited regulation as their biggest concern. Half said economic uncertainty was their greatest challenge.

That’s why Democrats have been offering real solutions to our jobs crisis and policies that help small firms hire, grow and thrive again.

The truth is we have enough to worry about in these tough economic times.

We can’t allow the myth to distract us from the very real crisis of high unemployment facing this nation.

INHOFE JOINS FELLOW GOPERS WHO FLIP-FLOP TO OPPOSE REPUBLICAN-SUPPORTED TAX CUTS ONCE DEMOCRATS SUPPORT THEM.

Sen. Hatch Supported Payroll Tax Cut Before Democrats Supported It – But Now It’s A “Stimulus Gimmick.” “Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, co-sponsored a temporary payroll tax holiday for companies that hired unemployed workers last year. However, he said he would have to see convincing evidence that it helped create jobs before supporting a new one. ‘We need to make sure the payroll tax cut is not just some other stimulus gimmick,’ he said in an interview.” [AP, 6/23/11]

Sen. Alexander Defended Payroll Tax Cuts Before Democrats Supported Them – But Now They Are “Short-Term Gestures.” QUESTION: And if you look at the proportions, though, of the top, top sector of earners in this country getting the bulk of the benefits, why does that help? ALEXANDER: Well, if you’re a small business person in Tennessee, what this means is that you won’t be paying tens of thousands of dollars, perhaps more, in taxes and you can use that to create a job. It also means that your employees who work there will get a one-third reduction in their payroll tax payments every two weeks. And maybe they’ll spend some more money creating more jobs. So it’s a combination of policies that all together are focused on jobs. [NPR, 12/9/10]