Obama’s Regulatory Czar has resigned:
Cass Sunstein, administrator of the powerful Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the White House Office of Management and Budget, will return later this month to his previous post at Harvard Law School, the White House will announce Friday.
Obama said of Sunstein:
“For the last three and a half years, Cass Sunstein has helped drive a series of historic accomplishments on behalf of the American people.”
Accomplishments?
During the last 3+ years Obama and his “regulatory czar” have issued 106 new major regulations (as of March 2012).
…at a cost of more than $46 billion annually, and nearly $11 billion in one-time implementation costs. This amount is about five times the cost imposed by the prior Administration of George W. Bush.
Five times more than Bush. But wait! Didn’t Obama say he issued FEWER regulations than Bush?
“I’ve approved fewer regulations in the first three years of my presidency than my Republican predecessor did in his.”
Sure thing.
Oh, it gets worse:
The Obama team has launched the greatest regulatory barrage in history. It just hasn’t taken effect — yet. I won’t even take up the red ink and red tape involved in Obamacare. Just take one other example: the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (called by IBD the Dodd-Frankenstein Bill).
The sweeping law requires more than 400 separate rulemakings that may not be fully implemented for several years. It is such a regulatory nightmare that no agency is able even to come up with its final cost to the economy. One estimate has it that it has already cost the financial industry ~900 billion. The cost each year to the economy? Upwards of a trillion? The very fact that no agency, government or private, can come up with a reliable figure says it all. But not all is bad. The regulatory onslaught is a boon for compliance lawyers and government regulators, whose ranks will swell by 2,849 new positions, according to the GAO.
The law also created perhaps the most powerful regulatory agency ever established – the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It has the power to regulate, free of congressional oversight even over its budget, every consumer financial transaction and then some. And, as the IBD article (7/24) points out, it is in large part a civil rights agency with special provisions for minorities.
And even worse:
According to an analysis by the National Federation of Independent Business, more than 4,000 federal regulations are scheduled to be implemented over the next four years with a cost of more than $515 billion to the U.S. economy. In our world of trillion dollar deficits, anything in the billions may not sound like such a big deal anymore, but recent regulations have already added $140 billion, sending the total annual regulatory cost to $1.75 trillion. If no action is taken to stop this, the NFIB estimates that the regulatory costs will quadruple over the next four years.
So what in the world are all these new regulations? Well, most of them have to do with protecting the environment and the air we breathe. Unfortunately, the sheer cost of the regulations may produce a severe economic downturn, rather than any valuable environmental impact.
All these regulations do is to create reams of red tape. It prevents the job creators from creating jobs. Congressman Mike Kelly from Pennsylvania gave a great speech last week on the floor of the House describing that very thing:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1YQDjpuY_U[/youtube]
We renovated a ball park in my home town, a guy named Tom Bernakowski (sp?), veteran. It cost a couple million dollars to renovate our ball park but the day we were going to open up I got a phone call at the dealership, he said ‘Mike would you come down’ I said ‘why what’s going on’ he said ‘we’re having trouble with the occupancy permit,’ so I went down to see what’s the problem and he said ‘come in the men’s room let me show you what the problem is’ I said ‘you know we have 1,500 people that want to come and see the ball game’ and he said ‘we got a major problem, you see the mirrors in the restroom are a quarter of an inch to low.’ ‘So you can’t possible open that ball park.’
So you want to know the price of regulation? You want to talk about the thousands and thousands of pages that we put on the backs of the job creators? You want to talk about creating jobs in America? You want to see a nation that doesn’t want to participate but wants to dominate in the world market…then let them rise, take the heavy boot off the throat of America’s job creators and LET THEM BREATH!
The July jobs report has just been released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The U6 Underemployment Rate rose from 14.9% to 15.0%.
Non-farm payrolls (NFP) rose 163,000. But with over 12 million unemployed, that is still a small number compared to what is needed. It did beat expectations, however.
Now for the bad news (other than unemployment rates rising). In July, the number of part-time jobs added was 31,000 while the number of full-time jobs fell 228,000.
So, let me get this straight. The headline will be NFP rose 163k, while full-time jobs fell more (-228k).
Obamacare seems to be encouraging employers to add part-time rather than full-time jobs. Ah, regulations!
And not with regulatory czar’s like Cass Sunstein. We need fewer regulations. As Rep. King said so well, let our business owners breath, let them build and hire without the rolls and rolls of red tape. But as long as we have a President like Obama, and people like Sunstein, who believe that THEY know what’s best for Americans and they will damn well force us to do what they want via regulations…those job creators won’t be allowed to breath.
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