Earlier this week, President Obama announced a new push to eliminate wasteful, unnecessary and outdated federal regulations. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, he gave as his chief example a low-hanging piece of fruit: Saccharin, which millions consume daily in their coffee, has long been categorized as a dangerous chemical by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. This costly EPA rule has now been amended. As wonderful as that sounds, we suspect it is motivated less by a desire to ease regulation than by the need of a stridently anti-business administration to mollify corporate interests and business donors in a difficult election cycle. In Obama’s first two years in office, he showed no signs of concern about the number of costly regulations being issued by federal regulators. He set new records for both the number of major regulations issued (43) and their added annual net burden on the economy (conservatively estimated by the regulators themselves at $26.5 billion). None of these will be revisited or revised by Obama’s initiative. James Gattuso and Diane Katz of the Heritage Foundation, who analyzed the new regulations in detail, predict that the real costs of Obama’s regulations so far are probably much higher than the government estimates.
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