Obama Turns Thanksgiving Into Costly RulesgivingThis crap has to stop! 11/25/2015 06:40 PM ET
Regulation: As Americans sit down for their Thanksgiving feast, they likely don't realize that
another big, nonholiday-related expense is about to hit, courtesy of the Obama
administration: a new wave of regulations.
With little fanfare, the White House announced more than 2,000 new regulations — including
144 deemed "economically significant" — just before Thanksgiving.
The law requires doing this twice a year, and Obama has followed it faithfully — repeatedly
releasing rafts of costly new rules just days before holidays, when people are most distracted
and not paying attention.
Luckily, Heritage Foundation fellow James Gattuso is paying attention. He notes that the 144
new economically significant rules is a record, breaking the previous high of 136 set just last
spring.
The regulations, he adds, "span the full scope of American life, ranging from labeling
requirements for pet food, new test procedures for battery chargers, mandated paid sick
leave for contractors and automatic speed limiters for trucks to a dozen new rules limiting
energy use (and increasing the price) of everything from furnaces and dishwashers to
dehumidifiers."
Those rules might not sound so bad, but that phrase "economically significant" means that
each of them will cost the economy at least $100 million.
So, at minimum, those 144 new rules will cost us north of $14 billion a year. That doesn't
include the other 1,856 or so new rules, which will cost billions more.
And remember: Regulation has a cumulative impact on the economy. It builds with time, going
from molehill to mountain fairly quickly, a dead weight on the economy that lowers our
standard of living.
By any gauge, the regulatory state today is immense.
In its recently released 2015 report on regulation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute
estimated that government rules impose a cost of roughly $1.88 trillion a year on the U.S. —
or about $5,875 a year per person.
It not only hurts our economy by adding costs without offsetting benefits but also robs us of
our basic liberties.
Charles Murray recently nailed it when he wrote, "Congress passes laws with grandiose goals,
loosely defined, and delegates responsibility for interpreting those goals exclusively to
regulatory agencies that have no accountability to the citizenry and only limited accountability
to the president of the United States."
So, by all means, in the spirit of the season, let's give thanks for all the things that make this
the greatest country on Earth. But runaway regulation isn't one them.
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