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Cross-posted from Legal Planet. A current conservative refrain is the regulatory uncertainty is holding back the economy.  Consider an editorial entitled “Obama’s regulatory flood is drowning economic growth”: Businesses large and small face more uncertainty today about the federal regulatory environment than at any point since the New Deal . . . . Seeing this […]

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 […]

Shortly after my August 5th post criticizing their Data Quality Act complaint to EPA, the International Platinum Group Metals Association sent me a kindly-written response letter (Inside EPA recently reported on the letter). Accusing me of both missing the point of their complaint and brushing aside important scientific concerns to make a headline-grabbing call for “over-regulation,” […]

The final agency regulatory “look-back” plans, released by the White House this morning, don’t appear to satisfy anyone. They fall far short of their obvious goal: to placate greedy and intemperate industry demands that major rules be cancelled. And they distress public interest advocates, who fear they will preoccupy agencies with make-work at the expense of crucial […]

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 […]

What would you do if a report you funded was debunked by a scathing critique from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service?  What if you found that the researchers you funded had based 70 percent of their analysis of the costs of regulation on a regression based on opinion polling data?  What if the researchers who […]

Former Senator Blanche Lincoln, now heading the National Federation of Independent Business’s new anti-regulatory campaign, faced criticism in recent days for citing the debunked SBA study claiming regulations cost $1.75 trillion in a year. The NFIB used that stat last week in launching its campaign (see ThinkProgress), and Lincoln cited the number in a National […]

Austan Goolsbee, outgoing Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, took to the Daily Show on Wednesday for one last sit-down with Jon Stewart. Stewart included a question on regulations (part 2, at 3:55), and Goolsbee gave a spirited defense: Stewart: Does the president believe business is overregulated? Does he think we are bureaucratically so snafu-d […]

House Republicans are fond of accusing the Obama Administration of trying to “regulate when it cannot legislate.” With a slight modification, a similar accusation can be hurled at House Republicans: They are trying to appropriate when they cannot legislate. This accusation has the benefit of actually being true. The Fiscal Year 2012 appropriations bill for the EPA and […]