WhatFinger


Have a safe and compliant holiday, suckers.

White House stuffs 3,400 new regulations into your Thanksgiving turkey



Maybe we all did overreact to President Obama's executive amnesty, not because it's OK or insignificant, but because we really don't have a solid grasp on just how often he uses the reach of the executive branch to impose his will on the nation. The Daily Signal reports that the White House is getting ready to drop 3,400 new regulations on the nation, and many of them are significant in scope and effect. We're talking about everything from coal rules to restrictions on carbon emissions to curb "climate change."
And of course, they released this news on the Friday before a holiday. While most people were focused on Jonathan Gruber and executive amnesty, they managed to slip this under the radar:
The latest agenda includes 23 new “economically significant” rules–those with estimated economic impact of $100 million or more per year. That’s up from 21 in last year’s agenda. Those rules, as Batkins said, are the “big-ticket items.” Compliance costs could top $20 billion. For example, the Consumer Product Safety Commission plans to issue flammability standards for upholstered furniture that could cost more than $100 million. The Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to issue a final rule on coal ash residue, expected Dec. 19, with compliance costs of $20 billion. Also to be finalized next year is the EPA’s set of rules to limit greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants.

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Now the Unified Agenda is not something the Obama Administration created. It's long been in place as the big-picture plan of any given administration for its regulatory plans. But there is a big difference between how previous administrations used it and what this one is doing, as the Signal story also explains:
But under the Clinton and Bush administrations, Batkins said, the Unified Agenda typically was a “normal, boring list of regulations” released each fall and spring. He said the Obama administration’s penchant for releasing new regulations near the holidays shows it views it “as a politically charged document.” . . . In a March report from The Heritage Foundation, regulatory policy experts James Gattuso and Diane Katz found that the Obama administration issued 157 major regulations during the president’s first five years in office. For the same period under President George W. Bush, the government issued 62 major regulations. Those 157 new rules, Gattuso and Katz found, cost Americans close to $73 billion. According to the American Action Forum, the $16 billion annual average for compliance costs is “tantamount to having a $160 billion tax increase over 10 years.”
Don't get confused by the distinction between "major" regulations and all regulations. The total number of regulations is massive at 3,400, but the really major ones are where the federal government impacts your life in a major way, and the Obama Administration is the most aggressive yet at imposing these. So Happy Thanksgiving! Make sure you follow the rules, because there are more of them than ever.


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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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