Wayne Crews, a vice president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and nationally recognized authority on federal regulations, wrote a commentary in The Washington Times in which he said, “Mr. Obama’s slate of yet more regulations is beyond merely alarming in this tense environment. The Federal Register already stands at more than 54,000 pages so far this year.”
Also, Crews noted that “Back in the early 1990s, the proportion of all regulations impacting small business stood at 14 percent of the total number of regulations. Today, 21 percent of rules impact small businesses—up three percent from 2009.”
Repeal Dodd-Frank. Suspend Sarbanes-Oxley until it can be reformed. Repeal Obamacare. Institute an immediate moratorium on new government regulations and take a machete (not a scalpel) to the current Federal Register.
We are witnessing the Democrats confession that the stimulus was a complete disaster and, by extension, that Keynesian economics itself is a failure. Bernstein cannot claim any positive results in the economy -- because there simply aren't any -- so he's reduced to fantasizing how things would have been worse without the stimulus -- the very alternate history he acknowledges he cannot know.
A major component of Obamacare is “totally unsustainable.” Those aren’t the words of Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin; no, those belong to the Obama administration’s own chief cheerleader, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, in testimony before the Senate Finance Committee. The program in question, the CLASS Act or Community Living Assistance Services and Support Act, is a massive long-term elderly care entitlement program that was quietly tucked into Obamacare and never got anywhere near the attention it deserves.
In separate testimony last week, the HHS secretary admitted to double-counting Obamacare’s cooked books. The question posed was whether a $500 billion cut in Medicare should be counted toward preserving Medicare or funding the new law. Her own actuary previously acknowledged they must choose one or the other. Mrs. Sebelius‘ reply? “Both.”
The Keynesian pump-priming of Mr. Bush and the pump-flooding of Mr. Obama have been unmitigated disasters. The inescapable reality is that the government cannot create wealth and every dollar it spends must be taken from the private sector, which can. As Ayn Rand wrote, “You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.”