Federal Regulations Good For The Economy

Or so says Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid. In fact, he's so sure of it that he has used his parliamentary power to make sure that no less than fifteen House-generated bills curtailing bureaucratic excesses have died aborning in the Senate. Never mind the findings of the committees over in the House of Plebeians, this Senator knows that regulations do no harm to the economy because, well, he just knows.

On Wednesday, the great Patrician rose on the floor of the Senate to tell the Ignorati: "While it's proper to guard against and remove onerous regulations, and we need to do that, my Republican friends have yet to produce a single shred of evidence that the regulations they hate so much do the broad economic harms they claim. That's because there aren't any (emphasis added)." Tell that to the farmers and and agricultural workers in California's Central Valley. Or perhaps the 20,000 workers, union and non-union alike, who will now have no jobs generated by the stalled Keystone XL Pipeline.

Those House bills will not see a vote so long as Reid remains in charge of the machinery of getting bills to Senate committees and the Senate floor. In fact, Reid touts the record of Democrats in preventing new regulations from being enacted during the Obama administration. His stalking-horse (or Judas Goat) is nobody less than the regulations czar himself, Cass Sunstein. Sunstein is nothing if not an accomplished liar.

In the three years of the Obama administration, the number of regulatory federal employees has increased by thirteen percent to 281,000 petty bureaucrats. In 2010 alone, the number of regulations increased by eighteen percent. For 2011, there are over four thousand new or revised regulations pending. The budget for regulators and regulations during the Obama administration is now at $54 billion annually, an increase of sixteen percent.

And those are only the direct costs. The Small Business Administration estimates that federal regulations are an annual cost to everyone of $1.75 trillion. In all fairness, this big government regulatory monstrosity has been burgeoning for decades. Like Topsy, it just growed. Most of that trillion-plus figure was snowballing before the Obama administration ever slithered its way into office. The seventy-five new regulations from the first twenty-six months of Obamism have added a mere $40 billion to the burden to business and consumers (I never thought I'd find myself saying a mere $40 billion).

But never fear. The One is working on it. The above figures don't yet include the costs of the pending EPA clean air/clean water rules, carbon suppression, FCC net neutrality rules, Dodd-Frank banking and investment regulations, and the Big Kahuna--Obamacare. I think it's time someone walked up to Harry Reid, slapped him hard in the face, and yelled "wake up you unconscious fool!" During the worst economic times since the Great Depression, crippling regulations (including pre-Obama regulations) are continuing to proliferate, bureaucracies continue to grow, the federal payroll continues to increase, and the brain-dead Reid still holds that there is no adverse effect on the economy.