Banks will now be pressured to make even more risky, low-income loans. Obama has sent to Congress his proposal to create a politically-correct Consumer Financial Protection Agency. “The agency would be in charge of enforcing the Community Reinvestment Act, a law that prods banks to make loans in low-income communities.”
Government pressure on banks to make low-income loans was a key reason for the mortgage meltdown and the financial crisis. Yet Obama’s disturbing proposal would empower the new agency to enforce the Community Reinvestment…
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Yesterday, Obama signed into law a deceptive FDA “tobacco regulation” bill that will undermine public health in the long run by protecting cigarette manufacturers against competition from less deadly tobacco products (which is why the nation’s largest cigarette maker supported the bill). As Bill Godshall of Smoke Free Pennsylvania notes, the bill “protects the most hazardous tobacco product (cigarettes) from market competition by the least hazardous (smokefree) tobacco products, as it:
* bans all new and recently introduced smokefree products, while keeping…
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The “smokes” may be different, but the Food and Drug Administration’s ever-vigilant watch to keep us safe from ourselves in its quest to quantify and purge all health risks from society continues. Their latest target? Smokeless cigarettes, or so called “E-cigarettes.”
The devices in question utilize an atomizer to vaporize a nicotine and propylene glycol (a substance commonly found in fog machines) solution that the user inhales and exhales as a vapor. Since there’s no tobacco, combustion, smoke, or smell involved,…
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The President has just announced proposals for a major overhaul of the financial system. The proposals would force banks to make even MORE risky loans to low-income people. Even liberal newspapers like the Village Voice have admitted that “affordable housing” mandates are a key reason for the housing crisis and the massive number of defaulting borrowers. But Obama will not accept this reality. Instead, he wants to create a new “Consumer Financial Protection Agency” to rigorously enforce regulations pressuring banks to make loans to low-income…
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The Senate has just passed the FDA tobacco regulation bill by a 79-to-17 vote. The bill now goes to President Obama, who has said he will sign it. The bill has odd and counterproductive provisions. Curiously, the bill would deny companies’ protection against “tort liability — even if they rigorously follow every FDA rule.”
As I noted earlier, FDA regulation may actually undermine public health by making it harder to market to smokers other tobacco products, like snus, that are not as lethal…
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Congress is about to enact a bill to subject tobacco to FDA regulation. Mark Berlind notes one anomalous feature of the bill: it would deny companies’ protection against “tort liability — even if they rigorously follow every FDA rule.” We wrote earlier about how FDA regulation might actually undermine public health by making it harder to market to smokers other tobacco products, like snus, that are not as lethal as cigarettes.
As Jacob Sullum notes, the law will require snus “to carry a…
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The third in an occasional series that shines a little light on what the regulatory state is up to.
Today’s Regulation of the Day comes to us from the Administration for Children and Families ($47.355 billion 2008 budget).
On June 26, the National Commission on Children and Disasters is having a meeting. They will be talking about another meeting from the day before.
While not a regulation per se, the meetings could result in multiple new rules hitting the books – and taxpayers. According…
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Most of the $800 billion stimulus package has yet to be spent, but it’s already harming the economy, both by triggering trade wars that have cost at least 40,000 jobs, and by driving up interest rates for businesses that need to borrow money to expand or create jobs. (The government is keeping down interest rates on its own debt by printing vast sums of money to buy its own bonds, in order to finance the exploding national debt, which will result…
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Harvard economist Martin Feldstein, who has advised Obama, warns that “the barrage of tax increases proposed in President Barack Obama’s budget could, if enacted by Congress, kill any chance of an early and sustained recovery.” He compares Obama’s tax increases to the ones that contributed to the Great Depression and the “Lost Decade” of economic stagnation and decay in Japan.
Feldstein, who serves on Obama’s economic advisory board, has also “warned of serious inflation and higher taxes down the road” as a result of Obama’s policies.
Feldstein singles…
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Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will weigh whether to decide what a federal judge called the “the most important separation-of-powers case regarding the President’s appointment and removal powers to reach the courts in the last 20 years.” Law professors Kenneth Starr and Viet Dinh, who worked on the case, have an editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal urging the Supreme Court to hear the case, which challenges a powerful, and largely unaccountable, federal agency called the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB).…
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Growing up in Long Island in a nearly 100-year old wooden house meant there were innumerable opportunities for bugs to enter–everything from stinging, buzzing, and blood-sucking creatures found their way in. We did have one really good weapon against them. Periodically, we would vacate the house for the day, and my mother would set up the “bug bomb”—the pesticide fogger that would penetrate the hiding places of all those nasty pests. It worked miracles. The bugs cleared out, and we…
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The anti-American Taliban extremists are resurgent not only in Afghanistan, where they once sheltered Osama Bin Laden, but also in neighboring Pakistan (which has nuclear weapons) as well. Thousands of Pakistanis are fleeing the Swat Valley, which is dominated by the Taliban.
But the Obama Administration stubbornly refuses to learn from the Bush Administration’s mistakes in Afghanistan. It’s stepping up efforts to wipe out the mainstay of the Afghan economy, by eradicating the opium poppies that Afghan farmers cultivate. Afghans are so…
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Not many details have appeared, but the Atlantic reports on a speech given by the administration’s Melissa Hathaway in McLean, VA:
In her speech, Hathaway did not say much about the administration’s policy changes, although published reporters indicate that Obama plans to create a powerful national cybersecurity directorate that would work through the Department of Homeland Security, establish a national cybersecurity recovery plan and resolve longstanding conflicts between agencies.
I remain suspicious of collectivizing and centralizing risk in governmental bodies, and of…
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The prosecutor in Contra Costa County, California won’t prosecute shoplifters anymore, citing budget cuts. It’s open season on retailers in that large suburban country. But rather than focusing on that, many prosecutor associations are stupidly supporting the federal hate-crimes bill, which would waste taxpayers’ money by allowing people who have been acquitted in state court to be reprosecuted in federal court.
The FCC is wasting time fining broadcasters for fleeting expletives under an indecency policy that is applied broader than the FCC’s own…
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The federal government is perpetrating Enron-style fraud against investors in its bailouts of Merrill Lynch and Freddie Mac.
The Treasury Secretary and Chairman of the Federal Reserve forced the CEO of Bank of America to merge his bank with failing Wall Street investment bank Merrill Lynch — and pressured him to keep the resulting losses secret, violating investors’ rights under the securities laws.
“Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and former Treasury secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. threatened to remove the…
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On the surface, given the economic turmoil we’ve had, there was nothing that remarkable about the bankruptcy of shopping mall owner General Growth Properties (GGP). Late last week, GGP filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, an action that some had been expecting for months given its debt of almost $25 billion.
GGP was the second largest mall owner in the country — with properties including Chicago’s Water Tower and the DC area-Tyson’s Gallleria – and filed for what has been described the biggest U.S. real…
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Instead of meeting with the executives of credit card issuers and sactimoniously lecturing them about not raising rates, as he is doing today, President Obama would serve card holders more effectively by meeting with economists and listening to their concerns about the dangers of price controls on credit card services. Economists from all schools of thought — from Keynesian to supply-side — recognize the basic principle of microeconomics that price controls lead to shortages of commodities, including credit, and cause distortions that…
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The chief financial officer of mortgage giant Freddie Mac committed suicide today in his basement. The Obama Administration forced Freddie Mac to run up billions of dollars in losses to bail out mortgage borrowers, including irresponsible high-income households with modest mortgages.
Until last year, Freddie Mac was a GSE — a Government Sponsored Enterprise, an entity chartered and subsidized by the federal government, but owned by private shareholders. But the federal government seized direct control of Freddie Mac last year after it ran up big…
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This year, we at the Competitive Enterprise Institute are suggesting that those who will be celebrating Earth Day remember the challenges presented by living in the natural world, and the inspiring ways that human beings have worked to overcome them. This new perspective is celebrated in a short video titled “Humans Make Earth Day Better.”
While Earth Day has previously focused on traditional concerns like pollution and recycling, we think it’s also a perfect time to think about the challenges human…
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Christina Hoff Sommers writes about a looming liberal war on science. Based on a campaign promise Obama made to feminist groups in October 2008, Sommers foresees the Obama Administration moving to artificially cap male enrollment in math and science classes to achieve gender proportionality — the way that Title IX currently caps male participation in intercollegiate athletics. The result could be a substantial reduction in the number of scientists graduating from America’s colleges and universities.
Critics have long argued that the Title…
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