The American Spectator

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Special Report

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A regulatory stimulus package would create a more favorable environment for business and wealth creation by (1) freezing enactment of new non-essential rules, (2) reviewing the regulatory state as a whole and implementing a bipartisan package of cuts, and (3) instituting a permanent "sunsetting" process of ongoing rule reviews and purges.

Congress could start by repudiating the slate of crippling energy regulations already enacted (and those being proposed this election year).

A Deregulatory Stimulus package is a good start. But we also need to hold Congress accountable for the good and bad that agency rules do. Voters elect their members of Congress, not the bureaucrats in the implementing bureaucracies. The latter lack incentives to police themselves, so they rarely acknowledge that the costs of the regulations they implement could outweigh their benefits.

By delegating lawmaking power to agencies, Congress is the prime mover behind regulatory growth. Sound public policy would hand the responsibility back to Congress and require elected representatives to affirm new major rules and their costs before they are made effective

Long-term economic health owes much to minimal regulation, not short-term stimulus. We badly need better control of the fiscal state -- but just as badly we need to rein in the regulatory state. The federal budget itself didn't even hit $1 trillion -- the regulatory state's current perch -- until 1987. Look at us now. Stimulus, indeed.

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Taxes, Business, Federal Budget, Entitlements, Environment, Constitution, Law, Energy