Regulation: Nobody should be fooled by President Obama's latest effort to appear business-friendly by trimming a few old federal regulations. This is still the most pro-regulation, anti-business administration in decades.
Back in January, just after Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, Obama issued an executive order calling on agencies to sweep out their regulatory closets and toss any unneeded rules and regulations.
Last week, dozens of agencies delivered their lists, offering up hundreds of outdated, redundant or just plain crazy regulations that could be scrapped.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, for example, found $40 million worth of redundant workplace reporting rules. The EPA discovered it was treating spilled milk at dairy farms like the Exxon Valdez, at a cost to the dairy industry of $146 million a year.
Cass Sunstein, head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, claimed that "the reforms have the potential to save billions of dollars."
If the agencies actually cut all this useless red tape — a process that in most cases still requires lengthy review and could easily be jettisoned — that's good news.
But in the end it's meaningless, since Obama is at the same time eagerly imposing a vast array of rules and regulations on every nook and cranny of the economy, the costs of which will overwhelm whatever minor savings his regulatory review achieves. Consider:
• The number of pages in the Federal Register — the government's central repository of new regulations — leapt 18% from 2009 to 2010.
• In just his first 18 months in office, Obama imposed 43 major regulations that will cost businesses more than $26 billion. As the Heritage Foundation noted in a report out last fall, that's "far more than any other year for which records are available."
• As ObamaCare kicks in, it will saddle the health care industry with a mind-boggling amount of new rules. Just six pages of text in the law already resulted in 429 pages of regulations.
• The Dodd-Frank financial overhaul will require 243 rule makings by 11 federal agencies, the Heritage report notes. That doesn't include whatever mischief the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau dreams up.
• The paperwork burden for the FCC's net neutrality rule — which supposedly would keep Internet service providers from restricting consumers' online access — is reportedly so extensive and time consuming that, five months after announcing it, the agency still hasn't been able to issue the rule.
• As IBD reported last week, the Education Department is getting ready to impose a new rule on for-profit colleges that, according to Democrats and Republicans alike, will hamstring this once thriving industry with costly new regulatory burdens.
On and on it goes. Obama wants credit for recognizing that federal regulations hamper economic growth, often without providing any real benefits in return.
He doesn't deserve that credit. Not as long as he continues to wage regulatory war on every front of the private economy.
No comments:
Post a Comment