In his first term, President Barack Obama has grown government regulations and spending at an unprecedented pace. At a greater rate than any U.S. president in history, he has spent about $1.5 trillion per year in office – adding $5 trillion to our national debt that now exceeds our total annual gross domestic product (GDP). Similar sovereign debt crises now threaten Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Ireland.
Obama has massively expanded the reach and costs in new healthcare, financial and environmental regulations – over 4,000 new regulations proposed in 2011. Contrary to the Administration’s claims that these government rules and regulations are necessary to protect us and our environment, and add jobs, many government regs kill jobs and only grow a central government that we can no longer afford. This greater government involvement in our lives also promotes the pathology of personal dependence (i.e., co-dependence) on government benefits to the demise of personal privileges, responsibilities and individual freedoms.
Part of the process of developing government laws and regulations is the cost-benefit analysis, where the utility of the proposed rules are assessed using certain performance and impact assumptions. The Economist (Feb. 18, 2012) has found suspicious manipulations in the Obama Administration’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) assumptions that bias government cost-benefit practices. Obama’s OIRA distorts cost-benefit analyses with intangibles to grease passage of new regulations that often further burden businesses and grow government costs while cynically rewarding Obama’s partisan voters.
Here are some of the OIRA cost-benefit manipulations in the area of environmental regulations:
- Doubling of “co-benefit” assumptions – assume that costly rules to reduce mercury in coal-fired energy could also reduce fine particulates that aggravate asthma;
- Exaggerated “private benefit” assumptions – assume that private benefits would always attach to “social benefits.”
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