The Agenda Behind the Republicans' Latest 'Jobs' Agenda: New CPR Report Reveals Effort to Gut Regulations Is Based on False Premises
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 discussed in a recent post, the evidence shows that regulation is not a drag on employment because it stimulates the creation of as many new jobs as are lost, and because job gains from regulation can offset job losses, leading to a net gain in employment.
But there is another problem with the Republican agenda: it ignores the benefits of regulation. A new CPR white paper on regulatory benefits indicates why the Republican deregulatory agenda won’t help with jobs and is a bad deal for Americans.
Government regulation has greatly benefited the American public, while the failure to regulate has cost us dearly. This reality is easily missed because no single, easily digested statistic perfectly proves the point. But, when my coauthors and I assembled the available evidence, we found that regulation has produced substantial and important benefits for the public without sacrificing …
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,” IPA reiterated their concern that EPA’s draft IRIS assessment for halogenated platinum salts fails to meet DQA standards. Their letter is an eloquently-written piece of advocacy, but it provides no information to alter my analysis that their complaint falls squarely within the realm of “frivolous” claims that EPA has the discretion to decline to review.
To recap, both OMB’s government-wide guidelines and EPA’s own internal rules for dealing with DQA complaints (both Bush-era creations) allow the agency to decline to review “frivolous” complaints, such as those “for which …
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 life-saving initiatives.
The plans themselves, at first look, are largely well-intentioned given the assignment the agencies were given. The EPA plan discusses, for instance, how the internet could be better used to facilitate on-line reporting by polluting plants. In some instances, though, the changes, if done as planned, would have real-life negative consequences: the planned axing of “clearance testing” under EPA’s renovation, repair and painting rule will save money, yes, but run the risk of leaving lead dust behind to poison children when they move back into renovated …
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 the data, including the latest Department of Labor study on the reasons why employers lay off workers.
Economic studies indicate that regulation is not a drag on employment and may actually increase the number of jobs. Bezdek, Wendling and Di Perna found that “EP environmental protection, economic growth, and jobs creation are complementary and compatible: Investments in EP create jobs and displace jobs, but the net effect on employment is positive.” (Quoted here, p. 15). Likewise, when Richard Morgenstern and his colleagues studied the impact of EPA …
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 had published that opinion polling insisted publicly that their data was never meant to be used for such purposes? What if a member of Congress had publicly lambasted you for keeping the underlying data used in the study from being examined by the public?
For the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy, the answer appears to be: Stay the Course. In new research proposal requests I noticed recently posted on the SBA’s website, the SBA appears to have learned little.
The Office of Advocacy’s flawed report that got so …
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 Journal forum post on Monday:
While some federal regulations are important, it costs the U.S. economy a staggering $1.75 trillion a year to comply with them, according to a report commissioned by the Small Business Administration last September.
Two respondents on the forum, CPR President Rena Steinzor and Public Citizen President Robert Weissman, specifically criticized Lincoln’s use of the thoroughly debunked number. In a new post Wednesday, Lincoln didn’t mention “$1.75 trillion” but instead wrote:
Currently, federal regulations are draining nearly 12 percent of U …
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 and entangled that that is the problem with the economy right now?
Goolsbee: As a general matter, no. Though there certainly are individual things that could be done different and streamlined, where, you know, they have to submit paper forms, they can’t do it on the web, you know, things of this nature. But, the president said from way back when, being for rules of the road doesn’t make you anti-market. And in fact, what we saw in the financial system, what we saw in oil drilling in …
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 the Department of Interior, currently being debated in the People’s House, is loaded down with dozens of anti-environment and anti-public safety policy riders. Several of these riders are virtually identical to bills that have been considered or are being considered in the House, but which have no chance of passing the Senate or surviving a presidential veto. These riders include a measure that prohibits the EPA from regulating coal ash as a hazardous waste (Section 434), blocks the EPA’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gases (Section 431), exempts …
No one seems to like the idea of regulation these days. Nudges, alternatives that try to get people to voluntarily alter their behavior by changing the context in which they make decisions, have been widely touted as a better approach. Cass Sunstein, Obama’s “regulatory czar” in the Office of Management and Budget, is a leading proponent of the “nudging” idea, and the co-author of a popular book promoting the concept that people should be gently helped to make better decisions for their health and welfare, rather than ordered to do so.
No one is against incorporating nudges into policy, at least no one I know. But the proponents of nudging sometimes make it sound like nudging should entirely replace more coercive approaches. A new report from the UK’s House of Lords Science and Technology Committee throws some cold water on that idea. The report concludes …
In April, CPR released a paper that looked at 12 critical rulemaking activities that we urged the Obama administration to finish by June 2012. The new regulatory agendas released by the agencies earlier this month show that instead of moving forward, the agencies are often slowing down. Contrary to the “tsunami” of regulations that the Chamber of Commerce claims is hampering economic recovery, this is a molasses flow that will delay life-saving public protections for workers, air breathers and water drinkers.
One rule that was on track in April is now definitely off track: an update to the National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for particulate matter. Another rule that was on track is now probably off track: the Power Plant New Source Performance Standards for limiting greenhouse gases were pushed back from May 2012 to Jun 2012, which is the deadline we identified to complete rules …
