In a piece in the
Wall Street Journal, President Obama has written that he
wants to ensure that federal regulations “protect our safety,
health, and environment while promoting economic growth.”
He made a similar claim in his State of the Union
address.
Before anyone starts calling him the “deregulation
president,” it’s worth taking a closer look at his piece. Hidden in
the fluff, of course, is a lot of nonsense — even points
he must think are nonsense. Like: “…we have, from time to
time, embraced common sense rules of the road…” Only “from time to
time,” Mr. President? You are so right!
How about this: “Over the past two years, the goal of my
administration has been to strike the right balance” — the right
balance, that is, between “placing unreasonable burdens on business
— burdens that have stifled innovation and have had a chilling
effect on growth and jobs” and “meet[ing] our basic responsibility
to protect the public interest.”
What does he take us for? The past two years have been a
time of unrelenting regulating without any attempt whatsoever to
strike a balance, let alone “the right balance.”
Mr. Obama says he is ordering a government-wide review of
the rules already on the books. Really? On December 31, 2010, the
Federal Register, where those rules are hiding in plain sight, was
82,589 pages long. Raise your hand if you really think Mr. Obama’s
people are going to review a significant portion of
them.
“Where necessary,” he writes, “we won’t shy away from
addressing obvious gaps …” including “efforts to target chronic
violators of workplace safety laws.”
In a piece here last week,
I referred to a CATO Institute graph of workplace fatalities that
indicates that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration
(OSHA) has had no effect at all during its forty years of
existence. Anyone who points to OSHA as a success story is either
ignorant, not serious, or being deceptive (the reactions to Tucson
caution against stronger language for a time).
Mr. Obama says he wants “disclosure as a tool to inform
consumers of their choices, rather than restricting those choices.”
What is that all about? One thing consumers are capable of
doing is demanding information — when they want it. If companies
discover consumers want information, they’ll provide it. That’s one
way companies compete. What we have now is TMI — too much
information — required by: guess who.
“[F]inally,” Mr. Obama writes, “I am directing federal
agencies to do more to account for — and reduce — the burdens
regulations may place on small businesses.”
Certainly the cost of regulations to small businesses is a
lot greater proportionally than it is to big businesses. According
to Nicole V. Crain and W. Mark Crain, businesses “with fewer than
20 employees incur regulatory costs 42 percent greater than firms
with between 20 and 499 employees, and 36 percent greater than
firms with more than 500 employees.” In addition, some of the
legislation, e.g., the Americans with Disabilities Act, hurts
precisely the people it is intended to help (surprise!).
Toward the end of his piece, Mr. Obama writes, “Despite a
lot of heated rhetoric, our efforts over the past two years to
modernize our regulations have led to smarter — and in some cases
tougher — rules… Yet according to current estimates of their
economic impact, the benefits of these regulations exceed their
costs by billions of dollars.”
You have to smile.
Here are three actions the president could have taken if
he were serious:
1. Propose the elimination of one major regulatory agency.
OSHA would be a good place to begin. Meddling by OSHA is estimated
to cost around $65 billion a year, and has been completely useless.
Small businesses would applaud.
2. Propose that all regulations that impose their
requirements on businesses with fifteen or more employees be
amended wholesale to affect only businesses with fifty or more
employees — the threshold, not incidentally, for ObamaCare. If
fifty is good enough for socialized medicine (sorry, Tucson, time’s
up) it ought to be good enough for all other regulations. A hundred
would be better. But Rome wasn’t burned in a day.
3. Appoint a panel of experts, all skeptics of regulation,
to estimate the real cost of regulations. The government’s
estimates are just what you’d expect from… government. Nicole V.
Crain and W. Mark Crain estimate the cost to be at least $1.75
trillion, or 14 percent of U.S. national income. By comparison, the
income-tax burden is about $2.3 trillion. If people could wave the
real figures at their congressional representatives, we might get
real reform.
A good post-Tea-Party-election guess is that all three of
these things will happen in the next ten years. A better guess is
that they won’t happen on this president’s watch.
