With another 428,000 new unemployment filings last week, the flood of bad economic news continues to point to a recessionary double dip that President Obama’s $859 billion stimulus program was promised to prevent. And let’s not forget that, while Obama and a Democratic Congress were pump-priming as never before, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke was injecting another $1.6 trillion in freshly printed bills into the economy. Surely now the Keynesian belief that massive government spending is the way to ignite economic growth during a recession has been utterly and forever discredited. But a congressional report released last week added another layer of explanation for the abject failure of Obamanomics since 2009. Along with the explosion of federal spending, Obama directed his appointees at key federal departments and agencies to embark on an unprecedented expansion of bureaucratic regulation. Thousands of new bureaucrats were hired at places like the Department of Heath and Human Services and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and legions of costly new regulations soon poured forth.
The report by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee headed by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., took aim at Obama’s “regulatory tsunami” and concluded that the pace and scale of new regulations threatens the ability of the government to fulfill even its most basic regulatory functions. Here’s how the congressional panel summarized its conclusions:
