President Obama’s partisan regulatory Czar, Cass Sunstein, claimed that the U.S. government would work “to eliminate unjustified regulatory costs and to reduce burdens.” And, Sunstein was partially correct -- in 2012 the government authorized $2.5 billion in regulatory rescissions and reductions. However, such regulatory cost savings were well eclipsed by more than $236 billion in new regulations. The actual result is a $518 billion regulatory expansion during Obama’s first term as president -- more than the gross domestic product (GDP) of Indonesia or Switzerland.
Perhaps his lasting presidential legacy, Obama has championed two founding tenets of liberal-progressive government, 1) tax, regulate and spend to grow the size and power of central government, and 2) expand a debilitating, partisan voter dependency upon government with bribes of government benefits.
Here are some of the Obama Administration’s new, excessive and costly regulations:
• While Obama has deferred most of his environmental agenda items until his “more flexible” second term, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had the costliest regulations in 2012 amounting to $172 billion;
• The widely unpopular Affordable Care Act (a.k.a., “Obama Care”) legislation continues to burden American business with an additional 44 million paperwork hours (over 21 thousand man-years labor) needed from the Dept. of Health and Human Services, the Center for Medicare Services and the Food and Drug Administration;
• The controversial Dodd-Frank financial reforms legislation requires 32.7 million new paperwork hours (over 15 thousand man-years labor) from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission;
• Obama has enacted regulations amounting to over $34.6 billion in new regulatory costs to our 30 largest corporations;
• The most costly of all new regulations fall under the requirements for energy efficiency and fuel conservation totaling $311 billion.
All new Obama regulations total costs are estimated to be $518 billion. (American Action Forum, Jan. 15, 2013)
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