More Right-Wing Pseudo-Research on the Costs of Regulation
The Competitive Enterprise Institute is out with the latest in a series of industry-friendly reports overcooking the supposed costs of regulation, while understating or simply ignoring the vast benefits to health, safety and the environment. Not surprisingly, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times were good enough to put the right-wing echo chamber in motion in its service.
A few quick thoughts: This report isn’t scholarship, it’s arithmetic advocacy—and it’s poor arithmetic at that. The organization that sponsored the report is more concerned with advancing its political agenda of laissez faire government at all costs than it is with sound public policy. This report is meant to advance that agenda, rather than inform the ongoing debate over the U.S. regulatory system. After all, what good does it do to tally up the costs of regulation without providing an estimate of regulatory benefits with which to compare them? Policymakers and the media would do well to ignore this report.
The report’s findings appear to be based on several inflated regulatory cost estimates, lined up and added together to produce exactly what the author likely intended: a huge number. Some of the numbers come from …
Spring is here in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, which means plenty of sunshine ahead, and not just in the weather. Several important government transparency actions taken by the Maryland General Assembly before it adjourned the 2015 legislative session a few weeks ago will provide Marylanders with greater access to state records and shed new light on compliance with environmental goals.
First and foremost, Marylanders for Open Government spearheaded an effort to address longstanding problems facing concerned citizens, stakeholder groups, and the press in obtaining public information in Maryland, culminating the most significant reform of the Public Information Act (PIA) since its enactment in 1970. The new law establishes a new compliance board to hear complaints regarding overcharging of fees for PIA requests and sets out a relatively swift timetable for the resolution of complaints. The law also creates a Public Access Ombudsman, appointed by the Attorney General …
As many scholars have noted (see here and here, for example), the Federal Power Act’s bright line jurisdictional split between “retail” sales of electricity (regulated by states) and “wholesale” sales (regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) is untenable in the modern era. The interconnected nature of the electric grid – electricity flows freely throughout the nation - means that many activities at one level affect the other, and vice versa. The precise allocation of state and federal jurisdiction to regulate this modern network, however, remains unclear.
On Monday, the Supreme Court took a step toward providing that clarity, granting the petition for certiorari in FERC v. Electric Power Supply Association. This case squarely tests the split of authority between FERC and the states, as it is an appeal of a decision by a divided D.C. Circuit panel that held that, although “demand response” can impact the …
Almost a decade after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans-area residents are still trying to hold their government accountable for mistakes that allowed a monstrous flood to devastate their city. Last week, in a case called St. Bernard Parish v. United States, a federal judge helped their cause.
In a dispute involving a major navigation channel controlled by the Army Corps of Engineers, Judge Susan G. Braden of the United States Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C., found that the Corps’ negligence in maintaining that passage caused flooding of such consequence that it amounted to a “taking” of homeowners’ property under the federal constitution, thus requiring the payment of “just compensation.”
The facts behind the Katrina flood—perhaps the most expensive engineering failure in American history—are well known to experts. After Hurricane Katrina had passed over New Orleans, a series of levee breaches caused flooding to …
With the announcement that GM Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra received the outsized compensation of $16.2 million in 2014, what should have been a year of humiliation and soul-searching for that feckless automaker instead ended on a disturbingly self-satisfied note. Purely from a public relations perspective, Barra worked hard for her money. Appearing repentant, sincere, and downcast, she persuaded star-struck members of Congress that the company was committed to overhauling a culture characterized by what she called the “GM shrug,” loosely translated as avoiding individual accountability at all costs. Even as she blinked in the television lights, GM fought bitter battles behind the scenes to block consumer damage cases and exploit corporate tax loopholes.
Largely on the basis of her political adeptness, Barra has been taking victory laps in the business press, hailed as the rare (female) CEO who has led her corporation out of a …
