Republican Nonsense on Regulation
Jonathan Weiler
HuffPost
Posted: 12/28/11 07:12 PM ET
A persistent GOP line of attack against President Obama is that he's inflicted an intolerable "regulatory burden" on American businesses. Mitt Romney, for instance, has been telling campaign crowds that the Obama administration has issued four times as much regulation as past presidents. This claim is false. According to Bloomberg news, the Obama administration has issued 613 new federal rules so far in his presidency. During the same period in the presidency of George W. Bush, his administration had issued 643 new rules.
Romney has, in fact, repeatedly misrepresented the Obama administration's regulatory record. As with so many Republican Party talking points these days, his claims about Obama and regulation are not intended to be factual statements. Instead, they're meant to advance a larger conservative meme: that regulations are necessarily and inherently bad. The standard GOP view of regulations is that they impose a cost on business and "kill" jobs in the process, while delivering no benefit to the economy or society more broadly. Examples to the contrary abound. For example, in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the Obama administration issued new rules on deep sea oil drilling. Those regulations might cost industry $200 million or so. But it's quite obvious that the problem in this case isn't "excessive" regulation -- it's that the regulation didn't come soon enough (a disastrous oversight for which the Obama administration bears some responsibility).
The direct costs alone of the Deepwater Horizon disaster could exceed $16 billion. Had the new rules been in place prior to the disaster, billions of dollars would have been saved and a larger environmental catastrophe could have been avoided. In that vein, among the most far-reaching regulations has been the Clean Air Act, whose estimated cost savings since its passage run into the trillions of dollars. In addition, while Republicans repeatedly decry the job-destroying effects of regulations, most sober-minded economists say that the overall effects of regulations on jobs are minimal.
(More here.)
HuffPost
Posted: 12/28/11 07:12 PM ET
A persistent GOP line of attack against President Obama is that he's inflicted an intolerable "regulatory burden" on American businesses. Mitt Romney, for instance, has been telling campaign crowds that the Obama administration has issued four times as much regulation as past presidents. This claim is false. According to Bloomberg news, the Obama administration has issued 613 new federal rules so far in his presidency. During the same period in the presidency of George W. Bush, his administration had issued 643 new rules.
Romney has, in fact, repeatedly misrepresented the Obama administration's regulatory record. As with so many Republican Party talking points these days, his claims about Obama and regulation are not intended to be factual statements. Instead, they're meant to advance a larger conservative meme: that regulations are necessarily and inherently bad. The standard GOP view of regulations is that they impose a cost on business and "kill" jobs in the process, while delivering no benefit to the economy or society more broadly. Examples to the contrary abound. For example, in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the Obama administration issued new rules on deep sea oil drilling. Those regulations might cost industry $200 million or so. But it's quite obvious that the problem in this case isn't "excessive" regulation -- it's that the regulation didn't come soon enough (a disastrous oversight for which the Obama administration bears some responsibility).
The direct costs alone of the Deepwater Horizon disaster could exceed $16 billion. Had the new rules been in place prior to the disaster, billions of dollars would have been saved and a larger environmental catastrophe could have been avoided. In that vein, among the most far-reaching regulations has been the Clean Air Act, whose estimated cost savings since its passage run into the trillions of dollars. In addition, while Republicans repeatedly decry the job-destroying effects of regulations, most sober-minded economists say that the overall effects of regulations on jobs are minimal.
(More here.)
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1 Comments:
An article listing all the regulations the Obama administration has abolished would be refreshing.
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