Wall Street Journal Bags on New Obama Regulations to Cost in Excess of $1 Billion

Remember last week when Speaker Boehner wrote the President about Obama Administration regulations and the American economy. Here is my post.

Well, President Obama HAS responded.

President Barack Obama says his administration is considering seven new government regulations that would cost the economy more than $1 billion a year, a tally Republicans will pounce on to argue that Congress needs the power to approve costly government rules.

In a letter to House Speaker John Boehner, Obama lists four proposed Environmental Protection Agency rules and three Department of Transportation rules estimated to cost in excess of $1 billion. One of the proposed EPA rules – an update to the health-based standard for smog – is estimated to cost the economy between $19 billion and $90 billion.

The letter, dated Tuesday, comes as the Republican-controlled House prepares to consider legislation that would require congressional approval for any new regulations that would impose a significant cost on industries.

The four environmental regulations, which target air pollution and coal residue primarily from coal-fired power plants, have already been attacked by House Republicans, who have said they would kill jobs and harm the economy.

The letter was in response to a Boehner request last week for more details from the president on the proposed costs of the most expensive regulations under consideration by his administration. Obama’s administration has identified 219 proposed regulations this year with a cost to the economy of more than $100 million.

Obama said a number of regulations being contemplated are in such preliminary stages of review that they have no reliable cost estimates.

The president said the seven proposals he did identify are not final and that his administration will give careful consideration to cost-savings. He said his administration already has made changes that have saved more than $10 billion in regulatory costs over the next five years, and said new regulations must meet cost-saving requirements that he ordered earlier this year.

He also defended his regulatory record, saying the cost of final rules adopted in 2007 and 2008, during the administration of President George W. Bush, were higher than in the first two years of his administration.

Now, I see the Obama Administration’s strategy = blame the Bush Administration.

I don’t think this is going to fly in the GOP dominated House, especially when you have American business already complaining.

Update:

Here is a piece in the Wall Street Journal that directly answers the problems with regulations and the Obama Administration.

Among the core assumptions of modern liberalism is that future regulations have no more effect on the economy than future taxes, as if expectations don’t matter and businesses don’t prepare now for their costs tomorrow. President Obama’s letter to John Boehner yesterday is a classic of the genre.

Last week the Speaker asked the White House to disclose any federal rules in the works with economic costs of $1 billion or more. Proposed or final rule-makings are defined as “major” when their estimated annual costs exceed $100 million. The Obama regulatory agenda for 2011 contains 219 such items. Last year, that figure was 191, versus the combined total for the first two years of the Bush Administration of 103. Amid this surge, Mr. Boehner’s underlying point was that the regulatory ambitions of the Obamanauts are redefining “major,” much in the way trillion is the new billion for government spending.

Mr. Obama responded by identifying seven pending major rules topping $1 billion, like the Department of Transportation’s federal motor vehicle safety standard No. 111 for rearview mirrors ($3 billion) and the Environmental Protection Agency’s ozone regulations (as much as $90 billion). But even that understates the costs, as Mr. Obama explains at length. The regulatory agenda is “merely a list of rules that are under general contemplation” and “merely proposed” and “includes a large number of rules that are in a highly preliminary state, with no reliable cost estimate.”

In other words, regulations that the Administration plans to issue don’t count. The President’s health-care plan doesn’t affect hiring because it doesn’t really kick in until 2014, and the Dodd-Frank financial reregulation isn’t a drag on lending because no one knows what dozens of agencies may do, except that it will be very expensive.

Mr. Obama adds that “it is extremely important to minimize regulatory burdens and to avoid unjustified regulatory costs.” That “unjustified” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, but we’ll merely note that you can’t minimize or avoid them if you pretend they don’t exist until they formally enter the Federal Register.