House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi sat for an interview with CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo last week on the state of the economy. Based on her remarks here, we can conclude that — as dismal as the current downturn is — it would only be worse if the Sage of San Francisco and her ilk were still running the lower chamber:
h/t: Hot Air
Previously, I’ve written about the need to pass the Regulations from the Executive In Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act by Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY). If passed, the bill would require all new bureaucratic rules costing $100 million or more to have an up-or-down, standalone vote in Congress, plus the President’s signature before going into effect.
The main purpose of the REINS Act is to give Congress a check on the administrative state so that job-killing regulations get a chance to be eliminated before going into effect.
This is yet another example giving the lie to President Obama’s charge of a do-nothing Congress, the House majority continues to move bills that will help the economy. The House Judiciary Committee reported the bill favorably yesterday. Here’s hoping it gets fast-tracked for a full House vote soon.
Quin’s point is well taken. Obama-era regulations and rhetoric are scaring away the kind of investment growth the country needs to get Americans back to work. On the regulatory side, increased capital holding requirements stack dollar bills in bank vaults while small business loans dry up. Cost-of-employment drivers like Obamacare and the EPA’s threatened regulation of carbon make any rational employer look for ways to enhance productivity and efficiency instead of staffing up. Simply put, under President Obama it’s cheaper to do more with less to keep what you have rather than risk the money and regulatory gauntlet trying to increase market share.
On the rhetoric side, my recent column on the five most recent dumb statements by the president contains just a sample of his daily assaults on the ambition and energy of America’s job creators. What the president fails to see is that a sustainable government depends on a vastly more prosperous private economy. Until he learns the importance of that relationship, we’re likely doomed to being (and producing) much less than we otherwise would.
Btw, Quin: I’m sure you’ve got business contacts in the Mobile-D.C. corridor. Are any of them looking at the current and future regulatory scene and thinking, “Gee, what a great time to expand”?
Perhaps a head nod to Hot Shots fans will lessen the depressing (but by no means surprising) analysis from the Sacramento Bee’s Alan Autry on the dismal failure of Jerry Brown’s resurrected governorship:
The governor has signed nearly 745 bills, most aimed at yet more micromanagement of every aspect of our lives from Sacramento or at satisfying the interests of the organizations that funded his election. The Los Angeles Times said, “When the dust settled on Gov. Brown’s first legislative session in nearly three decades, no group had won more than organized labor.”
There you have it, the product of Brown’s first year in office: signing off on campaign payoff obligations, more Sacramento micromanagement, vetoing of bipartisan common sense reforms to increase government efficiency and effectiveness, procrastinating on regulatory reforms to help job creation, and signing a gut-and-amend bill that will ensure even more partisan gridlock – this from the man who ran on breaking the “morass of poisonous partisanship.”
The canary is dead and the coalmine is collapsing. If you run a business and you have an option outside of California – take it.
According to an article in the journal Regulation, there are two ways to regulate the flow of administrative agency rules. The “downstream” approach tries to “rein in onerous regulations after they have been promulgated.” The “upstream” method allows Congress “to restrict administrative agencies before giving them rulemaking authority during the legislative process.” The idea is to get fewer and less costly regulations with five key reforms:
1) Require agencies to review existing regulations for inefficiency at a set time after implementation (which sounds like something similar to Texas’ Sunset process)
2) Require agencies to eliminate duplicative rules if a new regulation would supersede an older one
3) Limit the total number of regulations during implementation of any new law (an attempt to make rule writers more cautious when spending their regulatory chips)
4) Establish a regulatory “pay-as-you-go” that rescinds one old rule for every new rule implemented (the authors also argue for a proportionality requirement that ensures against an economy-killing rule replacing a forgotten restriction no longer necessary)
5) Prohibit new regulations where costs exceed benefits
The key perk of the last proposal is requiring agencies to engage in a formal cost-benefit analysis during the implementation phase. That helps put the agency on record – and the voting public on notice – of the true impact about to hit before it’s too late.
Check out the short (4 page), tightly-argued article here.
H/T: Cato Institute
Don’t bother me with the facts; we’re trying to save the world here!
That’s essentially what Patrick Michaels of the CATO Institute says the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did when it decided that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger the environment and must be regulated.
The problem for EPA is that its own Inspector General recently stated that the process EPA used to justify its decision violated both federal law and scientific integrity. According to Michaels, federal law requires any endangerment finding that is “highly influential” to be rigorously peer-reviewed to ensure that economy-altering regulations are based on the best science available.
EPA violated that standard when it based its endangerment finding on a facially biased United Nations report favorably reviewed by at least one federal climatologist who worked for EPA – a clear conflict of interest.
The stakes are high. EPA’s endangerment finding is the legal basis for the agency to dictate energy regulations down to the kind of light bulb Americans can use in their homes. By cooking the books that authority rests on, EPA has destroyed any credibility it may have had.
Let the legal challenges begin (again).
Yesterday was a victory of sorts for those of us who want Congress to clip the wings of the regulatory state. In a near-perfect party-line vote the House of Representatives passed a measure prohibiting the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) from harassing businesses like Boeing for moving to business friendly states.
Earlier this year, the liberal majority on the NLRB sued Boeing for opening up a new factory in South Carolina – a right-to-work state – instead of expanding its existing manufacturing presence in Washington state, a union shop state. For the first time in its history, NLRB interpreted its congressionally delegated authority to include the power to punish a private business for relocating some of its operations to more profitable climes.
Congress now has an opportunity to correct NLRB’s overly broad interpretation.
NRLB’s unprecedented decision merits a brush back response like the one the GOP-controlled House delivered yesterday. Though the measure is likely to die in the Democrat-controlled Senate, the Boeing-NLRB tussle should be some Republican presidential candidate’s Exhibit A on the regulatory overreach of Obama’s federal government.
Unions can only grow if businesses grow first. It’s time for the liberals at the NLRB and elsewhere to remember that simple truth.
H/T: Washington Times
Speaker John Boehner’s jobs plan is well targeted. It was especially encouraging to see him lead with useful attacks on the regulatory state. As a matter of fact, if you look at the summary of his plan, you’ll see that item number one is about requiring congressional approval for “major” new regulations. What he’s referring to is the REINS Act, which we wrote about a couple of times while I was at the Washington Times. This is good stuff, and very important. Please do read those two links in the previous section for an explanation. The first of those came almost a year ago to the day; the numbers need updating, but this paragraph provides a sense of the problem:
Under the Obama administration, bureaucrats have gone wild, with the Code of Federal Regulations reaching a record 163,333 pages last year (and growing). That’s an increase of 22,000 pages since 2000. In 2008, the Small Business Administration estimated that the annual cost to the economy of these regulations was $1.75 trillion, which was even before the regulatory explosion under Mr. Obama.
On deregulation, Boehner is on the right track.
The Los Angeles Times reports that California’s unemployment is now 12.1 percent statewide, 25 percent higher than the national average, and second only to Nevada’s 13.4 percent.
For decades, California politicians have prided themselves on being “first in the nation” on numerous job-killing efforts such as fanciful global warming regulations, onerous land use regulations, and stupefying bans on products like Mylar balloons and plastic bags at grocery stores.
Recently, Troy wrote a painfully insightful piece on yet another attempt to wage war on business by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (higher taxes on commercial property).
California’s political class cannot resist the siren song of being the first to put the screws to the engines of economic growth. If Villaraigosa’s plan becomes reality, perhaps the Golden State will finally be first in a category no one should want: unemployment.
Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.
View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.
With its tough anti-illegal immigration law headed to the Supreme Court, the State of Arizona is opening up another legal front in its 10th Amendment tussle with Eric Holder’s Justice Department. NBC News reports that the issue this time is the Voting Rights Act:
Arizona is challenging the law’s requirement that the state seek Justice Department approval for any changes in how elections are conducted. Many states are subject to the law’s pre-clearance requirement, generally to remedy past restrictions that discouraged minority voting.
“Arizona is still penalized for archaic violations that were corrected with the implementation of bilingual ballots prior to the 1974 elections,” said the state’s Attorney General Tom Horne. He noted that in 1974, Arizona became the second state to elect a Hispanic governor.
In his response, Attorney General Holder showed how tone deaf he is to any claim of federal overreach:
Vowing to fight the challenge, Holder said the provisions challenged in this case, including the pre-clearance requirement, “were reauthorized by Congress in 2006 with overwhelming and bipartisan support. The Justice Department will continue to enforce the Voting Rights Act, including each of the provisions challenged today,” he said.
So, a law is constitutional because Congress reauthorized it with “overwhelming and bipartisan support”? There isn’t a justice on the Supreme Court who has let that kind of vapid thinking dissuade him or her from overturning a law.
If that’s the best defense Holder can muster, Arizona may have found the perfect foil to (unwittingly) help it downsize the federal government.
Republican control of the House of Representatives may have stifled the Obama Administration’s grand statist designs in Congress, but the White House continues to push costly, job-killing regulation through the rulemaking power of the administrative state. Because new regulations enjoy nowhere near the media scrutiny of new legislation, however, the public often remains unaware of their role as silent predators on America’s economy. That’s why credit is due to House Speaker John Boehner for calling Obama to account for this economic poison. From Politico:
In a letter that will be sent to President Barack Obama on Friday, House Speaker John Boehner charges that planned regulations have jumped nearly 15 percent over the past year and he calls on the administration to calculate and publicize their economic impact.
“This year, the administration’s current regulatory agenda identifies 219 planned new regulations that have estimated annual costs in excess of $100 million each. That’s almost a 15 percent increase over last year and appears to contradict public suggestions by the administration this week that the regulatory burden on American job creators is being scaled back,” Boehner wrote.
“I was startled to learn that the EPA estimates that at least one of its proposed rules will cost our economy as much as $90 billion per year. The administration has not disclosed how many of the other 218 planned rules will cost more than $1 billion, nor identified these rules,” he noted.
If Obama is serious about “pivoting to jobs” (a promise we seem to hear on a quarterly basis), there’s no way he can ignore the costs of federal regulations, which are de facto tax increases. According to the Small Business Administration, the annual cost of federal regulation alone amounts to $1.75 trillion dollars. That’s nearly 12 percent of America’s GDP gone every year because of the Washington bureaucracy.
A failure to repeal many of these draconian monstrosities is economic malpractice. But a failure to simply reveal their costs is a dereliction of duty.
It’s always nice when liberals deign to give advice to conservatives on whom should be admitted to the next Tea Party rally. Commenting on excerpted parts of Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry’s book Fed Up!, Kevin Drum of Mother Jones thinks Rick Perry is wrong to think that it’s unconstitutional for the federal government to regulate banks, consumer financial choices, the environment, guns, civil rights, a minimum wage, and create programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
At least Drum acknowledges that Perry makes certain exceptions for federal regulations on racial discrimination since that fulfills “the intent behind the passage of the Reconstruction Era amendments.”
What makes liberals like Drum gasp is the fact that Perry thinks that, as James Madison argued in Federalist 45, “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.”
But if a secondary source won’t cut it for Drum, here’s the text of the Tenth Amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
If they cared to, Drum and other liberals would look in vain to find an enumerated grant of power to the federal government to regulate the items on the list above. That’s why they rely on activist judges to read into the Constitution federal powers that do not exist.
The Tea Party – like Perry, Michele Bachmann, and other constitutional conservatives – know their Constitution and the meaning behind it. If liberals like Drum are aghast, it’s only because a grassroots movement is forming to challenge nearly 80 years of unconstitutional jurisprudence.
In an interview with CFIF, Iain Murray, Vice President for Strategy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, discusses his latest book, “Stealing You Blind: How Government Fat Cats Are Getting Rich Off Of You,” and how the U.S. government has become a money pit filled with golden pensions, suffocating regulations and layers of bureaucracy.
Listen to the interview here.
In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses how overzealous authorities are shutting down children’s lemonade stands across the country. Giachino asks the question, “Could there be any more perfect metaphor for how government gets in the way of achieving the American dream?”
U.S. News & World Report summarizes a great one-page handout from the office of Senator John Barasso (R-WY):
At Tuesday’s GOP Senate caucus lunch, the lawmakers said that they will renew their efforts, supported by business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In a memo Barasso handed out to the lawmakers, he claimed that the administration in July only has put in $9.5 billion in new regulatory costs by proposing 229 new rules and finalizing 379 rules. Among those he cited were EPA, healthcare reform, and financial regulatory reform rules.
If you’re a Tea Party activist, or someone looking for a compact fact sheet describing the growth in government, check out Senator Barasso’s handout. (pdf)
What to do when your industry is singled out by government regulators as a threat to public health? If you’re in the soft drink industry, use the Freedom of Information Act against state and local governments to get documents that show how regulators use taxpayer dollars to attack legal commercial enterprises.
Earlier this month, the American Beverage Association sued New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which has been at the forefront of education efforts in the fight against obesity. The ABA says the city improperly withheld documents it sought through the Freedom of Information Act.
ABA spokesman Chris Gindlesperger said his group made the same request as the New York Times, but that the newspaper received more information than the ABA.
“Public health departments are going out and aggressively misrepresenting our products in advertising and using taxpayer money to do that,” Gindlesperger said.
Big government advocates are complaining that the FOI requests are “an effort to overwhelm or smother government employees, who already have too much to do.”
Then again, maybe those same government employees could lighten their load a bit by stopping the PR campaign against an industry selling a legal product to satisfied consumers.
Eric Singer, portfolio manager of Congressional Effect Fund, identifies the single biggest problem with government regulators in his op-ed for Investor’s Business Daily:
JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon recently asked Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke if he considered the cumulative impact of each regulation. Bernanke admitted he had not. The ongoing surprisingly bad unemployment numbers confirm that no one in charge is thinking about the cumulative impact of each tiny strangulation of capital and operating capability.
As Singer correctly concludes, “We need to go back to basics, cut these Lilliputian ropes and unleash the potential giant economy that is still on its back.”
One of the important contributors to the ongoing recession is the Consumer Products Safety Commission, which continues to take an unbelievably godawful law passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by an entirely clueless president Bush, and then make the law even worse by repeatedly using (and sometimes abusing) its discretionary powers to implement the worst — most burdensome, most costly, most bureaucratic, most job-killing — regulations that could possibly be issued in pursuit of Congress’ already idiotic mandates. (WHEW! — What a sentence!)
Yesterday, the Commission made things even worse, yet again. In a public statement for the record, dissenting Commissioner Anne Northup, an excellent former Member of Congress from Kentucky, explained why the Commission’s new rules for baby cribs are causing retailers to lose tens of millions of dollars unnecessarily:
The seeds for the majority’s decision were planted last fall when a six-month effective date for the new mandatory crib standard was set with insufficient consideration of its impact on retailers. The likelihood that retailers would be left with substantial unsellable stock at the end of the six months was increased when the Commission’s outreach efforts subsequent to the rulemaking failed to target retailers. Significant losses to retailers became almost inevitable when, in response to appeals for relief from the effective date, the Commission’s leadership failed to take adequate action to address the impending harm. Finally, the unjustifiable economic waste was assured when, after a bare majority of Commissioners agreed to hold a public briefing and vote on the issue, the Commission’s leadership directed insufficient resources toward understanding the scope of the problem. Simply put, the Democratic majority of this Commission is unmoved by economic harm to retailers….
In addition to the anecdotal accounts contained in these letters, NINFRA surveyed its members and 37 provided data on their numbers of noncompliant cribs in stock. Those 37 crib retailers had a total of 17,800 noncompliant cribs as of late May 2011. NINFRA’s representative also reported that their average wholesale cost was approximately $275 per crib….as of May 2011, a small fraction of the total retailer community still had at least 117,800 noncompliant cribs in inventory. Had I not asked during the hearing to have the data presented, it would not have been discussed. Incredibly, even after the data was introduced, the Chair asserted that she could not support an extension for “only 17,000 cribs” – completely ignoring both the Commission’s own survey, and the fact that our data was unquestionably incomplete….The Impact Report and oral staff presentation also failed to provide any estimate of the economic harm that would be suffered by the retailers maintaining noncompliant stock. Yet, I elicited through questioning the fact that staff was aware that the average wholesale cost of the cribs in inventory was $275. While I recognize that the Commission’s anecdotal data could not support a statistically significant extrapolation of the total potential loss, and that some number of additional cribs would likely be sold in the short time between when our data was obtained and the effective date of the rule, it would have been a simple matter to calculate the known potential losses: 117,800 X $275 = $32,395,000.
Again, these are cribs that while not compliant with the new regulations are also ones that have NOT been found unsafe. Yet the CPSC is requiring manufacturers to destroy them all. And this money-wasting, product-wasting, job-killing assault on slightly old baby cribs is just one facet of the CPSC’s war against scores of perfectly safe products of daily life. Follow the links within this blog post to learn more. If this isn’t an area that cries out for commonsense reform, and for some liberals Commissioners to be put in their own playpen without any power, then I don’t know what is.
Those wacky California bureaucrats are at it again! Reporting by the Wall Street Journal says that Golden State regulators “moved ahead Thursday with an investigation into AT&T Inc.’s $39 billion purchase of T-Mobile USA, raising a fresh hurdle for the U.S. wireless giant as it seeks the government’s blessing to acquire its third-largest competitor.”
The report goes on to explain that AT&T doesn’t need California’s blessing, only a green light from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Nonetheless, California’s objection could “carry weight” with the FCC’s board of governors, potentially scuttling the merger. Not bad for a group of regulators with zero jurisdiction over the matter.
With California staring at a multi-billion dollar deficit, perhaps this is the kind of government agency whose funding should be cut – or eliminated.
 CFIF Freedom Line Blog RSS Feed CFIF on Twitter CFIF on YouTube |
