Mere Proposals
September 1 | Posted by mrossol | Obama, The Left“Mine don’t count…”
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Among the core assumptions of modern liberalism is that future regulations have no more effect on the economy than future taxes, as if expectations don’t matter and businesses don’t prepare now for their costs tomorrow. President Obama’s letter to John Boehner yesterday is a classic of the genre.
Last week the Speaker asked the White House to disclose any federal rules in the works with economic costs of $1 billion or more. Proposed or final rule-makings are defined as “major” when their estimated annual costs exceed $100 million. The Obama regulatory agenda for 2011 contains 219 such items. Last year, that figure was 191, versus the combined total for the first two years of the Bush Administration of 103. Amid this surge, Mr. Boehner’s underlying point was that the regulatory ambitions of the Obamanauts are redefining “major,” much in the way trillion is the new billion for government spending.
Mr. Obama responded by identifying seven pending major rules topping $1 billion, like the Department of Transportation’s federal motor vehicle safety standard No. 111 for rearview mirrors ($3 billion) and the Environmental Protection Agency’s ozone regulations (as much as $90 billion). But even that understates the costs, as Mr. Obama explains at length. The regulatory agenda is “merely a list of rules that are under general contemplation” and “merely proposed” and “includes a large number of rules that are in a highly preliminary state, with no reliable cost estimate.”
In other words, regulations that the Administration plans to issue don’t count. The President’s health-care plan doesn’t affect hiring because it doesn’t really kick in until 2014, and the Dodd-Frank financial reregulation isn’t a drag on lending because no one knows what dozens of agencies may do, except that it will be very expensive.
Mr. Obama adds that “it is extremely important to minimize regulatory burdens and to avoid unjustified regulatory costs.” That “unjustified” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, but we’ll merely note that you can’t minimize or avoid them if you pretend they don’t exist until they formally enter the Federal Register.
Review & Outlook: Mere Proposals – WSJ.com.
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