Way back in January President Obama ordered "a government-wide review of the rules already on the books to remove outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive."
From that statement alone, you might conclude that Obama already knew that finding needless, burdensome regulation in the 81,000 pages of the federal register would be easy pickings.
More than seven months later, the Administration has announced the results of that exhaustive review. By the White House's own undoubtedly inflated estimate, the net benefit will barely be worth one-tenth of one penny of every dollar of expense caused by compliance with federal regulation.
Cass Sunstein, the Regulation Czar, says the regulation relief he announced yesterday will save business $10 billion over five years. But, the latest analysis by the Small Business Administration (SBA) calculates that compliance with federal regulation costs a staggering $1.75 trillion annually - and, that is a 2008 pre-Obama Administration estimate.
That does not include the 75 new major rules generated by Obama in just his first 26 months at an additional burden of $40 billion according to a study by the Heritage Foundation.
Worse, still to come are the impending clean air rules from the EPA, new derivative rules, net neutrality rules, the new CAFE fuel mandates, and the avalanche of rules mandated by ObamaCare and the Dodd-Frank legislation.
The government admits there are 4200 new rules or revisions already in the pipeline.
Sunstein's announcement is like finding a man drowning under Niagara Falls and "saving" him by removing a cup of water. It is further evidence of the complete detachment from reality by this Administration, and an insult to the intelligence of working people and employers alike to pretend that this is the sum total of outdated, duplicitous, needless regulation that in Obama's own words, "stifles job creation."
But, then should we have expected anything different from the Administration that the Wall Street Journal says has "turned a regulatory firehose" on American business?
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