The Federal Register is the daily depository of proposed and final regulations, plus presidential documents, executive orders, agency directives, and other notices.
Tomorrow’s Federal Register stands to surpass last year’s all-time high of 81,405, as cataloged in the latest “Ten Thousand Commandments.” We were all hoping for federal budgetary control and economic recovery this year, but things aren’t getting better on the regulatory front either.
Last year’s Register contained 82,480 pages, with 1,075 skipped or blank pages among them. I always net out the blanks in my annual tally. Wish it was enough to help.
The Hello Kitty Federal Budget Calculator is here to ease tension created by hostile political climate in the wake of the debt-ceiling-increase debates.
Yesterday, U.S. Senate Democrats selected Patty Murray, John Kerry and Max Baucus for the debt Super Committee charged with coming up with cuts this fall.
Markets, to say the least, are unimpressed, so more cuts must be made. The Super Committee now has a fresh way of going about it. The Hello Kitty Budget Calculator is particularly adept at recalculating baselines and future entitlements–always the sticking points–all with a friendly face. It’s a welcome solution.
In noticing the upcoming debate tonight featuring Republican contenders, I wondered to myself under which candidate would the federal government actually be smaller after four years, should any of them win?
Maybe Ron Paul, in working with some imaginary 114th Congress; but of course Trump told the CPAC crowd that Paul could never win. But he’s fun to watch.
Tonight’s candidates will make the general case to to cut spending and debt. But sometimes it seems that “Big Government Conservative,” which detractors called Trump, is a redundancy. The largest spending and regulatory programs have and do enjoy their support. There’s more Tea Partly than Tea Party in my view.
Thus even slashing record spending and debt is no longer enough — even if the budget were balanced at, say, half its current level. The regulatory state has surged such that the U.S. is an increasingly hostile environment for anyone inclined to create a business (and employ others).
My colleagues commented above on the Cass Sunstein lecture at the American Enterprise Institute called “Regulatory Look-Back: A First Look,” about agency’s supposed eagerness to comply with President Obama’s January Executive Order on regulatory review. Just moments ago, AEI released a summary of the event via email.
Sunstein is head of OIRA, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the bureau within OMB that’s tasked to some degree with keeping tabs on Washington’s federal regulations and making sure benefits justify costs.
Something that struck me was Sunstein’s notion, paraphrased by AEI, that “We are no longer forced to evaluate rules in the abstract, using unreliable anecdotes and intuition. Instead, agencies are equipped with state-of-the-art research techniques for evaluating the costs and benefits of regulations.”
For starters, I think it’s a philosophical mistake to accept the white-hat premise that because you call something a regulation that it’s doing good things. Agency rules can undermine actual “regulation” or improvement and escalation of the things we want, like privacy, security, consumer safety, infrastructure roll out, and so forth. I don’t know of any tainted meat that’s not regulated by USDA, you might say.
If “regulation” removes these values from the competitive realm required to advance them, then agencies are undermining the actual regulation that needs to take place. More on this elsewhere and later because it’s a critical element of the regulatory reform debate.
A new report in The Hill notes House Republicans’ concern over “dysfunction” at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the need for overhaul. Their primary concerns, at least in the elements of a Republican memo so far available, tend to emphasize the agency’s moving ahead with rulings without full publication, disclosure and opportunity for public comment, and with assuring minimum review periods in the future.
But questions for FCC, its compulsory net neutrality campaign and its enthusiasm for antitrust intervention need to go far deeper than that. To get overhaul, policymakers must themselves reject and then force FCC to reflect on and question the pro-regulatory bias that underlies everything it does. For example:
What is the agency doing to halt and discourage antitrust interference with communications ventures (like the overly delayed XM-Sirius merger, the delayed Comcast NBC merger, the current AT&T merger with T-Mobile, its yet-to-be-seen response to Microsoft/Skype) in order to foster massive-scale infrastructure competition and rivalrous response that competitors otherwise can forgo?
Describe FCC’s research into how innovation in user ownership (real estate developers, content companies, etc.) of portions of communications infrastructures offset market power and relax calls for net neutrality?
Describe FCC’s recent actions to promote alternatives to neutrality regulation such as promoting cross-industry partnerships by calling for the dismantling of regulatory silos that artificially separate infrastructure like electricity, water, rail, sewer, telecommunications and transportation.
Explain why compulsory net neutrality is the enemy of openness and expansion and what FCC is doing to combat it.
In what sense does FCC recognize the relevant competitive challenge is not merely the “neutral” transfer of information across today’s existing networks, but the creation of networks as such?
How does FCC intend to clarify to a confused policy environment that “neutrality” or “openness” represent one of many variable features of many types of networks that potentially can co-exist, than the defining characteristic?
How is FCC leading efforts to avoid fostering a federally managed communications industry riven with lobbying?
What is FCC doing to explain network management’s role in expanding infrastructure and bandwidth creation, consumer welfare, child safety, homeland security, network and information security, privacy and other desirable features of content and service, as well as reducing the vulnerability of intellectual property to piracy?
Describe the proliferation of overlapping networks at the dawn of the communications age, and how, if America could achieve that with 1907′s GDP level, it undermines the case for compulsory net neutrality in 2011.
Describe results of investigations into other alternatives to neutrality, such as reducing franchise, zoning, and environmental barriers.
Describe how FCC pledges to repudiate price and entry regulations in the wake of any neutrality mandates.
Describe how net neutrality will lessen future FCC authority and reduce its budget.
FCC concerns itself with none of these things, which is why overhaul or replacement should be on the congressional to-do list.
Elizabeth Brubaker describes why the institutions of private property are needed to defend nature, and why modern control policies that undermine them contribute to pollution and environmental destruction.
Our policy task today is to discover, legitimize and extend those private property institutions that can achieve and heighten environmental progress and expand environmental amenities. Today’s policies, in contrast, demean and abandon those essential institutions and traditions, and make enemies out of those who otherwise would be enlisted in the goals of ecological improvement. The entire book Property Rights in the Defence of Nature is available online.
Via the Mercatus Center: “According to McCloskey, our modern world was not the product of new markets and innovations, but rather the result of shifting opinions about them. During this time, talk of private property, commerce, and even the bourgeoisie itself radically altered, becoming far more approving and flying in the face of prejudices several millennia old.”
Humor break. I’d be equally inclined to see George W. in the photo for giving America both its first $2 trillion budget and its first $3 trillion budget.
In an ideal world, President Barack Obama would use his State of the Union to admit that America is broke and that his policies have laid the groundwork, not for a robust recovery, but rather for perpetual economic stagnation.
….He is instead likely to continue to claim that his policies of reckless spending and smothering regulation are leading to a bright new future of clean energy, green jobs, and economic security.
…Taken together, all [Obama's] new regulations … constitute an assault on the energy and natural resources foundations of our economy that will impoverish consumers, drive away investment, and further cripple manufacturing for decades to come.
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