And it’s on pace to hit a near-record 80,447 pages. Over at the Daily Caller, I crunch some of the numbers and offer up some Ideas for regulatory reform, inspired by Wayne Crews’ 10,000 Commandments.
-The Federal Register’s accelerating pace is due to two things. One is implementation of the health care and financial regulation bills. The other is that, fearing a party change in Congress, lame-duck regulating may have already begun.
-Keeping Federal Register page counts in check is important. Keeping the contents of those pages in check is even more important. Comprehensive regulatory reform involves much, much more.
-Such as five-year sunsets for all new regulations unless specifically reauthorized by Congress.
-And a comprehensive look at the regulatory state in each year’s Economics Report of the President.
-And a bipartisan commission to comb through the books for harmful or obsolete regulations. They would hand their recommendations for repeal to Congress for an up-or-down vote, without amendment.
Apparently the folks at Media Matters didn’t care for my July 12 article in the Daily Caller debunking the cell phone cancer scare.
The trouble is, I’m not quite sure why. They never say. Jamison Foser’s blog post doesn’t touch a single argument I made in the article. Instead he attacks me personally, as well as CEI. For all I know, he agrees with everything I said. Or maybe he disagrees. I don’t know.
His main point is that corporate funding makes arguments untrustworthy. Since CEI receives some corporate funding, we are therefore suspicious. This is not a rigorous line of thought. Arguments are either right or wrong. The presence or absence of corporate funding has nothing to do with whether an argument is right or wrong.
There is also the matter of Media Matters’ own very generous corporate donors, which Foser does not address.
Media Matters’ fixation on corporate funding is an easy way for them to avoid genuine intellectual engagement. It is a diversion. If you are unable to attack the argument, then attack the person making it.
This ad hominem attack deserves a rebuttal. The Daily Caller was kind enough to run mine this morning. I hope you will take a few minutes to read it.
Over at the Daily Caller, I debunk the fear that long-term cell phone use can cause brain tumors. San Francisco and Maine already have warning label regulations on the books. Rep. Dennis Kucinich has introduced federal warning label legislation. Here are the main reasons they’re wasting their time:
-Activists promoting the scare only ever mention brain tumors. But you hold your cell phone in your hand. You hold it next to your ear and your jaw. Why no mention of those cancers? Suspicious.
-Most phones only emit one watt of energy. The human body generates about a hundred times that much energy during normal, everyday activity. Adding a single watt to that baseline does nothing to contribute to the DNA damage that can lead to tumor growth.
-Cell phone photons are so weak, they fall short of DNA-damaging energy levels by about a factor of 500,000. So you might have something to worry about if you strapped half a million cell phones to your body. That would be getting crushed to death, not cancer. Phones don’t operate at cancer-causing frequencies.
Today’s Daily Caller features an article from me about CEI’s entry in the EPA’s YouTube video contest on regulations, expertly produced by Drew Tidwell and Nicole Ciandella.
The theme of the video contest is “Let your voice be heard.” The problem is that over-regulation drowns out your voice in a cacophony of commands and controls from the minute you get up in the morning until you go to bed at night. The Code of Federal Regulations is 157,000 pages long. And it’s still growing. Enough is enough.
Hopefully CEI’s video isn’t the only entry that makes that important point.
Today’s Daily Caller has an article by Wayne Crews and I making the case against the VAT, which is becoming a popular idea in this age of trillion-dollar deficits. Our main points:
-It would require roughly doubling the size of the IRS. Enough said
-VATs are untransparent. Sales taxes show up on receipts. VATs don’t. Knowing how much we are taxed is a fundamental right that preserves our ability to challenge excess government in a constitutional republic. A VAT would take that away.
-VATs increase over time. At least they have in 20 of 29 OECD countries that have VATs.
-VATs are prone to special-interest abuse. Politically incorrect goods are easily hit with punitive rates. In Denmark, people pay roughly triple sticker price for cars, for example.
An annual study claims that the NCAA’s basketball championship tournament makes workers less productive. The illicit temptations of filling out brackets and watching games instead of working will cost the economy about $1.8 billion this year. Over at the Daily Caller, I show why that’s (mostly) a myth.
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