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Government: Brandishing misleading employer survey data, Senate leader Harry Reid claims there isn't "a single shred of evidence" regulations cause big economic harm. Even President Obama disagrees.
It is self-evident that regulations on business kill jobs. Rules add costs. And the simplest way for a firm to recoup big expenses is by cutting salaries or by not adding new salaries.
With unemployment at 9%, it makes sense that Republicans are pointing to the Obama administration's over-regulation as one of the culprits. As the Heritage Foundation noted in July:
"In the first six months of the 2011 fiscal year, 15 major regulations were issued, with annual costs exceeding $5.8 billion and one-time implementation costs approaching $6.5 billion. ... Overall, the Obama administration imposed 75 new major regulations from January 2009 to mid-FY 2011, with annual costs of $38 billion."
It takes a major media outlet like the Washington Post, however, to remind those of us outside the government that we're not smart enough to realize the falsity of what is obvious.
"Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that very few layoffs are caused principally by tougher rules," a Post story claimed last week, explaining that "whenever a firm lays off workers, the bureau asks executives the biggest reason for the job cuts. In 2010, 0.3% of the people who lost their jobs in layoffs were let go because of 'government regulations/intervention.'"
But the BLS survey is, in fact, a meaningless gauge of businesses' views of the effects of regulation. This is because it dizzyingly asks respondents to divide their explanations for lost jobs into seven categories, plus no fewer than 28 subcategories.
Can some of the other classifications of job loss causes, like "domestic competition," "nonseasonal business slowdown," "organizational changes," "reorganization or restructuring of company," "financial issues," "cost cutting" and "financial difficulty," really be considered exclusively unrelated to government regulation?
Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., wants the public to think so, which is why he said on the Senate floor last Wednesday: "My Republican friends have yet to produce a single shred of evidence that the regulations they hate so much do the broad economic harms they claim. That's because there aren't any."
The Post article said that according to "economists who have studied this question" of regulatory burden, "the overall impact on employment is minimal."
But as former London Daily Telegraph editor Charles Moore writes in a Vanity Fair profile of the great Margaret Thatcher, "It gave her particular pleasure that 364 economists wrote to (London's) Times to denounce her policies: In her view, the more economists, the more error."
Leadership: A few years ago, six in 10 of us believed our culture was superior to others. Now less than half think so. How much does this have to do with electing a president who doesn't believe in America? Pew Poll results released last week show that only 49% of Americans agree ...
Election: Spain's voters have thrown out their ruling Socialists, giving conservatives their most decisive victory since the nation's return to democracy in 1978. Problems persist, but a shift in political course can only help. Unlike, say, California's voters, Spain's voters knew ...
Politics: The former White House chief of staff journeys to Iowa to trash the Republican presidential field. As the ship of state continues to sink, the former first mate ignores the iceberg he helped steer us into. One would think that Rahm Emanuel, currently mayor of Chicago, ...
Until the Reform Act of 1832, more than 100 members of the British Parliament were elected from districts that had very few people. These were called "Rotten Boroughs," and, while they no longer exist in England, at least one of them does in the United States. It is called Iowa. Every four years ...
The Debt Crisis: The "failure" of the supercommittee is better described as a success. Republicans stood firm against new taxes and got what they set out to achieve: deficit reduction that relies 100% on spending cuts. With the supercommittee's demise, Washington went into ...
Posted By: iajolly(295) on 11/21/2011 | 9:14 PM ET
Do you think that we'll ever insist that Congress members and the president must have run a business and, perhaps, studied economics for a semester or so? Might make them have a little common sense. (I'm not going to hold my breath.)
Posted By: bobbygordon(7855) on 11/21/2011 | 7:57 PM ET
Reid is evidently detached from reality, perhaps overrated in NV but, reality nonetheless. Simple arithmetic is all it takes to befuddle them; how do they get elected. Never underestimate the power of large numbers of stupid people lest we make the same mistakes as were made in Russia. And don't take the outcome of the coming election or the impending Supreme Court decision(s) for granted, both of which may grant them absolute power over the individual.
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