Obama's Regulatory Flood Drowns The Economy

If Obama really wants to simulate the economy, he needs to do less, not more.

Businesses large and small face more uncertainty today about the federal regulatory environment than at any point since the New Deal radically increased the role of the government in the nation's economy. Thanks to Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, plus President Obama's decision to use bureaucratic regulation to start major initiatives like cap and trade that Congress refused to pass, the federal bureaucracy has been drafting new regulations at an unprecedented pace. Seeing this tsunami of red tape flooding out of Washington, company owners and executives wisely opt to delay new hires and investments until they have a clearer idea how much their already huge compliance costs will increase and how the markets will be warped by changes mandated by the bureaucrats. 

As House Speaker John Boehner noted earlier this week in a blog post, "a simple scan of the Obama administration's current regulatory agenda indicates that the administration currently has 4,257 new regulatory actions in the works, of which at least 219 will have an economic impact of $100 million or more. That is an increase of nearly 15 percent over last year, when a similar search showed 191 new economically significant regulatory actions by the administration to be in the works." Even before those 4,257 new regulations go into effect, the Federal Register shows more than 81,000 pages of regulations, which result in compliance costs in excess of $1.7 trillion, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute's "Ten Thousand Commandments: How much regulation is enough" report for 2010.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/2011/08/obamas-regulatory-flood-drowning-economic-growth#ixzz1WQOTWi35