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Townhall
Finance...
Harry Reid:
Regulations Don’t Hurt
Economy
By Bob Beauprez
November 17, 2011
You
have to wonder which hole in the
sand Harry Reid has his head buried in.
Yesterday, in comments on the floor of the
Senate, the Democrat Leader
said the following:
“While
it’s proper to guard against
and remove onerous regulations, and we need to do that, 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 aren’t any.”
Reid’s
denial is in large part his
poor explanation for denying the Senate even one vote on any of the
“Forgotten
Fifteen” regulation relief bills that have been passed by the GOP House. Reid’s ludicrous statement
is also consistent
with Cass Sunstein, the Regulation Czar for the Obama Administration. When asked about all the
new rules and
regulations being promulgated by the Administration Sunstein said,
“There has
been no increase in rule making in this Administration.”
As
reported on these pages previously,
however, the total employment at the conglomeration of federal agencies
responsible for enforcing compliance with the myriad of laws now
exceeds
281,000 people. That’s
an increase of 13
percent already during the Obama Administration at a time when 27
million
Americans find themselves unemployed, under-employed, or have
completely given
up even trying to find work. The
budgets
at these same agencies have increased 16 percent during the same period
to over
$54 billion.
With
the expanded staffs, the agencies
have ramped up new regulations at a frightening pace, too. The Federal
Register, already about 80,000 pages, where all the regulation is
posted
increased 18 percent in 2010 alone, and 4,200 new rules or revisions
are in the
pipeline. According
to an Investor’s
Business Daily report that staggering total doesn’t include the
impending clean
air rules from the EPA, new derivative rules, the FCC’s net neutrality
rules,
the recently announced CAFE fuel mandates, or the eventual plethora of
new
regulation mandated by ObamaCare and the Dodd-Frank legislation.
Even
prior to the Obama
Administration’s onslaught of new rules and regulations, the Small
Business
Administration estimated that federal regulation imposed a $1.75
trillion
annual cost burden on the economy.
Further, according to the Heritage Foundation
the 75 new major rules put
in place in just the first 26 months of the Obama Administration added
$40
billion more in expense to American businesses.
We
really don’t think Reid is naïve
enough to believe that ever increasing amounts of regulation have no
adverse
consequences to the economy. That
leaves
only willful denial or an outright willingness to lie as the only other
possible explanations for his contention.
We’ll
let you pick which it might be.
Read
this and other columns at
Townhall Finance
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