Even More Evidence Disputes Claims that Regulation Is Stalling Economic Recovery, But Regulatory Opponents Continue to Press Their (False) Claims
Republicans in the House have spent much of the fall trying to blame regulation for the nation’s slow economic recovery. The fact that there is no reasonable evidence to back up this claim is apparently not a concern for the regulatory opponents. Moreover, regulatory opponents skip entirely over the impacts of the failure to regulate, pretending that while regulation imposes costs on the economy, the failure to regulate does not.
Now, there is even more evidence of that regulation cannot be blamed for our current economic woes. The head of the Congressional Budget Office has testified that regulation is not a drag on the economy. And we have learned from a terrific AP report that the same business firms that have told Congress that proposed environmental regulations are a serious problem have told the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—the federal regulatory body that regulates the stock market and protects investors from corporate abuses—that the impact is unknown or will not be significant.
The campaign against regulation is built on pillars of sand. Regulatory critics claim that regulation has a price tag of more than a trillion dollars, but the study used to back up this claim has …
Rep. John Dingell (D-Michigan) once remarked, “I’ll let you write the substance … you let me write the procedure, and I’ll screw you every time.” Legislation introduced yesterday in the Senate by Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), and Susan Collins (R-Maine) and in the House by Reps. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Collin Peterson (D-Minnesota) to amend the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) proves Rep. Dingell knew what he was talking about. The APA is the law that governs the way the various agencies of the federal government do their regulatory business – requiring them to operate in the sunlight and to solicit and weigh public comment about proposed regulations, and establishing a framework for judicial review of regulations. The new bill makes more than 30 pages worth of changes to the current APA, which is now about 45 pages long (not counting its Freedom of Information …
House Republicans have promised this week that upon their return to Washington after the recess they will attempt to stop 10 important proposed regulations because they are “job-destroying.” Adhering to the belief that “if you say it often enough, people will believe its true,” the party continues to insist that regulations cost jobs. But, as I discussed in a recent post, the evidence shows that regulation is not a drag on employment because it stimulates the creation of as many new jobs as are lost, and because job gains from regulation can offset job losses, leading to a net gain in employment.
But there is another problem with the Republican agenda: it ignores the benefits of regulation. A new CPR white paper on regulatory benefits indicates why the Republican deregulatory agenda won’t help with jobs and is a bad deal for Americans.
Government regulation has greatly …
The current anti-regulatory mantra of Republican legislators (e.g., Cantor, Boehner, Issa) and conservative think tanks (e.g., CEI and Heritage) is that regulation is a “job-killer.” And a top plank of Republicans’ job agenda when they return from the summer recess is to limit regulations. There is just one problem with this rhetoric. It is not backed up by the data, including the latest Department of Labor study on the reasons why employers lay off workers.
Economic studies indicate that regulation is not a drag on employment and may actually increase the number of jobs. Bezdek, Wendling and Di Perna found that “EP environmental protection, economic growth, and jobs creation are complementary and compatible: Investments in EP create jobs and displace jobs, but the net effect on employment is positive.” (Quoted here, p. 15). Likewise, when Richard Morgenstern and his colleagues studied the impact of EPA …
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has a Friday deadline to respond to a subpoena issued by House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.). The subpoena seeks "all documents and communications relating to the NLRB's Office of General Counsel's investigation of Boeing..." prior to the time the NLRB issued its complaint against the company. The NLRB has alleged the company created a second assembly line at a nonunion plant in South Carolina to build its 787 Dreamliner in order to retaliate against union workers on Puget Sound, who had a history of conducting lawful strikes.
No one can deny that the House has a legitimate interest in conducting oversight of the Board. At the same time, House ethics rules (House Ethics Manual, p. 303) and a Fifth Circuit decision (Pillsbury Co. v. FTC) prohibit congressional oversight committees from improperly trying to influence the …
On Wednesday, former senator Evan Bayh joined former George W. Bush Chief of Staff Andy Card at the Chamber of Commerce to formally announce their plans to tour around the country campaigning against regulations. The pair have already jumped into a series of falsehoods, endorsing, for example, the discredited SBA-sponsored study claiming regulations cost $1.75 Trillion in a year.
Over at ThinkProgress, CPR Member Scholar Sidney Shapiro takes a closer look at the pair's claims:
Bayh and Card see regulators as having “unprecedented power” and call for “restoring balance and accountability in the process.” I don’t know what regulatory system they are viewing, but it bears no resemblance to the one operating currently in the United States. Far from having “unprecedented power,” agencies find it difficult to complete any type of controversial regulation in less than six to ten years because they must negotiate …
Fact: It often takes agencies up to 10 years (in some cases even longer) to develop and issue critical regulations needed to protect people and the environment. These delays may save corporations money, but they impose real and preventable costs in terms of lives lost, money wasted, and ecosystems destroyed.
The reasons for this delay are not hard to divine. Before it can issue a rule, agencies must run a highly complex gauntlet of analyses and reviews that have piled up thanks to several decades’ worth of misguided regulatory legislation, executive orders, and OMB memos, letters, and circulars. The result is a mishmash of unnecessary or duplicative analyses and reviews that do little to improve the quality of agency decision-making.
For their part, agencies are hardly in the position to play these games. Over the last few decades, agencies have become overstretched as their budgets and staff …
The Obama administration has been busy with its regulatory look-back, which required agencies to identify health, safety, and environmental standards to be reviewed in the coming months, with the possibility of eliminating or modifying them (in some cases, the specific proposal for modification or elimination was already made last week). In explaining why the look-back is necessary, the administration sounds too much like the Chamber of Commerce or other anti-regulatory critics and not enough like candidate Obama, who once unapologetically asserted that “government should do that which we cannot do for ourselves.” Cass Sunstein, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), should adjust the tone when he testifies before a subpanel of the House Energy and Commerce Committee tomorrow. Instead of deploying another batch of anti-regulatory rhetoric, the administration should use more language that reminds the public of the value of regulation at the …
Congress charged the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) with the job of representing the interests of small business before regulatory agencies, such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). As an agency of the federal government, it has an obligation to taxpayers to get its facts straight before it speaks. Lately, it has ignored this basic obligation, most notably sponsoring a study that used flawed methodology to claim that regulations impose $1.75 trillion in costs every year.
Now, Dr. Winslow Sargeant, Chief Counsel for Advocacy at the SBA, has upped his attack on OSHA’s efforts to update its noise regulation, making assertions that are highly misleading and at times simply wrong. In an interview last week with the Phoenix Business Journal, Sargeant claimed:
The OSHA rule was a solution to a problem that had already been solved. Basically …
Last week, the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) approved a survey to be conducted for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) as part of the agency's efforts to develop an Injury and Illness Prevention Program (I2P2) standard. Surveys, like this one, have to be approved by OIRA according to the Paperwork Reduction Act, and the lengthy approval may stall development of the I2P2 standard for four or more months for no apparently good reason. OIRA made only minor changes to the draft documents.
The I2P2 standard is OSHA’s signature regulatory initiative, and it comes in the nick of time. With its small and dwindling staff, a result of Congress putting it on a starvation diet of resources, OSHA has found it difficult to update its safety and health standards to protect workers, or to adopt new ones to address hazards …
