Boehner to Obama: Come clean on cost of new regulations
The only question I have about this is: What took so long?
From a letter Speaker John Boehner sent today to President Obama:
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 [when there were 191 such regulations], and appears to contradict public suggestions by the Administration this week that the regulatory burden on American job creators is being scaled back. …
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. This information is of great relevance to the American people, who face so much uncertainty about these new regulatory costs, and to the Congress, where we continue to aim to work with you in relieving unnecessary burdens and helping employers move forward to create jobs.
I am again asking that your Administration provide a list of all pending and planned rulemakings with a projected impact on our economy in excess of $1 billion.
A reporting threshold of only $100 million is far too low. If we only know that each of the 219 new rules would cost at least that amount, we can only say that the aggregate cost is at least $21.9 billion. That’s bad enough — but as Boehner’s letter notes, one of the 219 on its own is projected to cost at least $90 billion. So, the total cost is really at least $111.8 billion, and probably much, much more.
The public ought to know exactly how much more.
Obama can propose all the new stimulus he wants, but any effects will be severely dampened by the $111.8 billion-plus his agencies are taking back out of the economy at the same time. And not even hard-core Keynesians claim there’s a multiplier effect for regulatory costs. This is the bureaucratic version of Bastiat’s broken window fallacy.
A better, no-cost stimulus would be, as I pointed out last week, to put a freeze on these costly new rules.
– By Kyle Wingfield
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209 comments Add your comment
Boehner asks Obama to disclose costly US regulations – Reuters | Odaso
August 26th, 2011
9:49 pm
[...] NewsThe Huddle: Boehner challenges ObamaPoliticoABC News (blog) -Washington Post (blog) -Atlanta Journal Constitution (blog)all 28 news [...]
MrLiberty
August 26th, 2011
10:25 pm
Actually Tiberius, once you realize that when you give government even an inch, they will take a mile, the appeal of anarchocapitalism becomes clearly obvious. I was not joking at all. There are likely hundreds of thousands of individuals in this country who would relish the prospect of eliminating formal government structure in favor of the self-regulating free market. There is even a great bumper sticker that you might find appealing one day – “I was a Minarchist until I ran out of excuses.”
It is a big step to come to the conclusion that we need a government that is actually controlled by the constitution, etc. but at a certain point you must take that final step and realize that governments won’t let a piece of paper stand in their way and that the problem fundamentally lies with giving any group of people the power over you and some sort of legitimized monopoly on force over everyone. For surely that is all that government is. No jokes here. No reason to kid about something as evil as government.
But that doesn’t stop me from arguing the point that a constitutionally limited government – if we could at least achieve that – would be far superior to the runaway fascism and socialism we have today.
And Junior Samples, it really doesn’t make a sound argument to twist my words to meet your needs. If you actually bothered to investigate the role the federal reserve (a government agency, despite what they call themselves), federal regulatory policies, easy credit, 401(k) rules, government created inflation, and other money destroying and corruption enabling policies had in enabling and encouraging the Enron and Worldcom scams, you would see that it was certainly not the unencumbered free market that was responsible.
I did not come up with the label Austrian nor Keynesian. They are schools of economic thought. The Austrians correctly predicted the Great Depression and have fully explained the business cycle and the role of easy credit and money/interest rate manipulation plays in them, while the Keynesians have been oblivious and generally promote the policies that cause or worsen these events. I suggest that you go to http://www.mises.org and read some sound economic teachings. I think that it would open your eyes tremendously to the fallacies the government economists espouse. I am not sure what the tomayto/tomahto reference is to. The two schools of thought are as different as night and day and if you don’t know that you need to do some serious reading.
MrLiberty
August 26th, 2011
10:35 pm
Junior Samples – if you want a good example of Keynesian thought, Ayn Rant does a great job of leading one down the fallacy of Keynes’ illogic. The stimulus we have been trying for the past 3 years (well, technically since about 1913) has all been about supposedly interjecting government capital into the market to get it going. The unfortunate delusion is that capital is homogenous while it most certainly is not. Capital that comes from savings is real, and represents an asset that will be available for future spending once the product produced by investment is available, while the capital that comes from government spending is simply taken from the productive sector, created out of thin air, and has no bearing on the availability of future assets for spending on the product produced.
A bit too complicated to describe in a short blog – certainly given the wonderful texts that have been written on the subject. Again, go to http://www.mises.org and search for “austrian business cycle” and do some reading.
Tiberius - Your lightning rod of hate!
August 26th, 2011
11:32 pm
Sorry, Micheal, but it’s not our tax rate that is hemorrhaging jobs, it’s our labor rate.
We have a deficit problem right now in addition to our recession. Lowering tax rates are questionable by themselves as an economic stimulator. We have to get our deficit spending under control, and putting more stress on the budget by cutting revenues is not the way to go right now.
Get rid of all loopholes and subsidies, flatten the rates and make it revenue neutral. relax regulatory requirements that cost an arm and a leg for businesses to build new infrastructure.
Or if you want to, just pass the FairTax and be done with corporate taxes altogether.
But the fiscally responsible way to balance the budget while still lowering rates somewhat is to get rid of tax breaks. All of them. The government should never be picking winners and losers in the business world.
Tiberius - Your lightning rod of hate!
August 26th, 2011
11:37 pm
OK, then, Mr. Liberty. You are officially a very scary person.
Look, I don’t like government at all, but even I realize that it is a necessary evil. And while I would love to see the day when there is no government, I am also a realist and know that it will never happen in the United States of America. Not in my lifetime, nor in 50 lifetimes.
Therefore, the realist in me does what I can to minimize the effect of government in my daily life, and in others.
And frankly, the problem with people on both extremes of this issue is that they are just setting themselves up for a lifetime of frustration and false hopes. I do not prefer to waste my life that way.
MrLiberty
August 27th, 2011
8:48 am
Tiberius – You will come around eventually. Sorry you feel that someone who respects the individual more than government is very scary. I find it a very scary thought that so many cannot fathom a stateless society. What hope do we have at reducing anything if we cannot get people to put more faith in the cooperative efforts of individuals than they put in the coercive force of government?
Lee
August 27th, 2011
12:25 pm
The Obama EPA has been engaging in a literal war against coal fired electricity generation. Ga Power has already announced retirements of four or five generating units because it wasn’t cost effective to put all the environmental controls on those units. Generating units, I might add, that would have run for another 30 years or so. The replacement units will cost hundreds of millions added to the rate base that you and I pay for each month.
You think this economy went into a tailspin when gasoline hit $4.50/gal, just wait until electricity doubles or triples. Meanwhile, China, Taiwan, Mexico and other nations are chugging along with no environmental controls.
No, I’m not advocating no environmental controls, but there is a cost/benefit analysis that must be conducted on these regulations. It’s time to put a little common sense in charge of the EPA.
Zack
August 28th, 2011
7:52 am
Dang, Kyle.
Keynes and Bastiat in the same AJC article? This place is getting a little too highbrow for me. If you’re not careful, you might actually force people to think a little.
House GOP to focus on overregulation this fall | Kyle Wingfield
August 30th, 2011
5:08 am
[...] appears that letter Speaker John Boehner sent to the White House last week foreshadowed part of the House GOP’s [...]