Regulators in the crosshairs

One major factor crippling the economic recovery is the tax-and-regulatory straightjacket confronting any American businessman who contemplates adding new jobs.

The mechanism by which these regulations and extractions come into being is part of the problem. For long decades, Congress has fallen into the habit of passing laws full of noble sentiments, but with lots of blank pages. These blank tablets are then sent on to the huddling hordes of unelected bureaucrats with the instruction, “We don’t have time to fiddle with the details; write up a few thousand pages of nice regulations to make all this happen.”

At least the elected representatives may hear occasional, distant squawking from back in the home district when some new edict proves particularly costly of time or money. But, tucked away in their warrens, the bureaucrats hear nothing, instead continuing to churn out their rules, oblivious to real-world effects.

They were told to ban toxic emissions, and so they order nation’s bakers to spend millions on hoods and filters so no one will ever again smell the aroma of fresh-baking bread as they drive by. “No exceptions!” they cry, even as small bakers fall by the wayside, promoting the concentration of the trade in ever fewer hands.

(No, I’m not making that up.)

Tuesday, President Obama, his Democratic majority wiped out in the November elections, was widely characterized as seeking to “mend his relationship with the business community” as he signed an executive order instructing federal agencies to look for rules that place an unreasonable burden on businesses, stifling job creation and hurt economic growth.

The review, Mr. Obama wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, tells agencies to look for outdated regulations that make the U.S. economy less competitive.

“It’s a review that will help bring order to regulations that have become a patchwork of overlapping rules,” Mr. Obama wrote. “We are also making it our mission to root out regulations that conflict, that are not worth the cost, or that are just plain dumb.”

I’d congratulate the president on this initiative to slash job-crippling federal regulations to the bone, if all this smoke up my butt didn’t tickle so much.

Let’s not hold our breaths waiting for his minions to return from their inspection tour, hats in hand, to inform Mr. Obama what would really help job creation is to get rid of all payroll withholding taxes, to block the expansion of the Clean Air Act into carbon dioxide regulations, and, um … to repeal the costly, job-killing mandates of Obamacare.

For the president’s initiative was not announced in isolation.

The Congress defines “major” regulations as those with annual effects on the economy exceeding $100 million. Over the past quarter-century both Democrat and Republican Administrations have averaged between 30 and 40 such rules a year.

But the Obama Administration promulgated 59 such major sets of regulations in 2009 and 62 in 2010, the Wall Street Journal reports. Not only that, another 191 are in the works, “many of them based on little more than a vague Congressional order.”

One hundred and ninety-one.

So Rep. Geoff Davis, R-Ky., and Sen. Jim DeMint, R-SC, have proposed the Regulations from the Executive In Need of Scrutiny (Reins) Act.

The bill guarantees an up-or-down vote (no Senate filibuster) on economic regulations likely to cost $100 million or more, which would henceforth be allowed to take effect only if Congress passed a joint resolution and the president signed it.

“Such a procedural change would revolutionize government in practice and help restore the representative democracy the founders envisioned,” The Wall Street Journal editorialized last week.

Is President Obama’s commitment to getting America back to work strong enough, sincere enough, and bipartisan enough that he will embrace, support, and agree to sign the Reins Act, even if it means slashing and crippling his beloved socialist bureaucracy?

Or is he, instead, offering a cosmetic half measure in the hopes it will take the wind from Rep. Davis’ and Sen. DeMint’s sails?

What do you think?

One Comment to “Regulators in the crosshairs”

  1. GunRights4US Says:

    Well, it’s more smoke and mirrors of course. Recall the much ballyhooed anouncement that he was going to slash government by $100 million? Yes…I said million – in a sea of billions! The lesson that all Americans need to absorb about this administration is simply this: watch what they do, and pay no attention to what is said.