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Rex Nutting Archives | Email alerts
Nov. 18, 2011, 12:01 a.m. EST
By Rex Nutting, MarketWatch
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) "” When Moses came down off Mount Sinai carrying the stone tablets, the Chamber of Commerce immediately fired off a press release denouncing the job-killing 10 Commandments.
And it's been the same story ever since.
Whenever the people (that is, the government) propose some restriction to right some wrong, you'll always find a businessman protesting that the costs would be too great and that, in the words of Charles Dickens in Hard Times, he would "sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic" than comply with the rules.
Of course, no property is ever pitched in the ocean. The businessman does what businessmen do: He fights the regulation tooth and nail, but if it is approved, he finds a way to make money without poisoning the water, fouling the air, employing toddlers or killing his customers.
Lately, though, the business lobbyists have become emboldened. In our current economic calamity, they see the opportunity to roll back all the restrictions that "” like a hangnail "” have absolutely ruined their very comfortable lives. And the Republican Party is a willing tool.
In CBO's judgment, the economic effects of certain changes in regulatory policies probably would be too small or would occur too slowly to significantly alter overall output or employment in the next two years.
"”CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf
Ask any Republican office holder or would-be president what ails the American economy and you are sure to find total agreement with Gov. Rick Perry's assessment: "It's the regulatory world that is killing America."
In the Republican world view, the only thing holding back the economy is Washington and its army of bureaucrats.
In the House, Republican leaders have taken hundreds of votes this year to repeal regulations that were designed to protect the environment and the health of 313 million Americans. If they were able, they'd roll back bank regulations to the time of the housing bubble. They'd roll back corporate accounting regulations to the time of Enron. They'd roll back environmental regulations to the time of Love Canal, or to the time of Dickens.
If you ask Republican leaders about their plan to reduce unemployment, they point proudly to these votes. Deregulation is the Republican jobs plan.
In a time of 9% unemployment, the Republicans say nothing is more important than freeing businesses from the burden of regulation, even if it means thousands of people will die and hundreds of thousands will fall ill.
This is no hyperbole: The government estimates that a long-delayed rule restricting emissions of mercury from power plants would save more than 15,000 lives a year. Read more about the power-plant rule.
Mitt Romney, who stands a very good chance of being our next president, says the first thing he'd do in the White House would be to sign an executive order to repeal every regulation passed since 2008 and to block every new rule that imposes any cost on business "” any cost at all, regardless of the benefits the regulation would confer. Read more about Romney's plan.
You hear a lot of talk from the Republicans and the bosses in industry about the costs of regulations "” for instance, the National Association of Manufacturers says the rules curbing mercury pollution would cost 230,000 jobs "” but they never mention the benefits of regulations. We never hear about the jobs created in other industries, or about the lives saved, or the millions of hours of working time that weren't missed, or the thousands of heart attacks Americans would forgo because they hadn't been exposed unnecessarily to mercury.
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