A new document released by the Biden administration again leads to the conclusion that the easiest identifier of modern self-styled “progressives” is that they really, really want to run other people’s lives.
Each year, the U.S. president must release a
Unified Regulatory Agenda
for purposes of public transparency and “to provide for coordination of
regulations
.” Among the legal requirements for the agenda is to identify all new “economically significant” proposed rules, meaning those that will cost the economy at least $100 million per year to implement.
CONSERVATIVES COMINATE COMMENTS PROCESS FOR NEW BIDEN RULES
Republican presidents tend to deregulate, or at least to slow down the rate of new regulations, while Democratic presidents love adding new federal rules to the hundreds of thousands already in existence. The Reagan administration, for example, made an annual habit of bragging about the
significantly lower number of pages
in the Federal Register under its deregulatory agenda than had been the case under Democratic predecessor Jimmy Carter. The quite reasonable assumption was that fewer rules meant more freedom, and that more freedom also led to greater prosperity.
The greater the number of rules, the greater the restrictions on individual and business choice and action. For liberals, the idea of having bureaucratic know-it-alls tell the rest of us how to live is a good thing. The rule of supposed experts is supposed to be more rational — as if office workers in some central location can make better decisions than can people creatively making things work in real time, on the ground, where they live and toil.
For years, for example, the liberals embedded in the Department of Labor have wanted to
crack down on franchised businesses
such as fast food restaurants. They want to
further tighten “David-Bacon” high-wage rules
that add to the cost of construction projects. And they want to end the subminimum wage for tipped employees (waiters, baristas, and the like). All of which sound like “pro-worker” moves until you realize that by making it too expensive for nonwealthy people to operate businesses, they actually reduce the number of jobs available and keep would-be entry-level workers from finding employment in the first place.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Wayne Crews reports that this year the number of “economically significant” rules has
risen to a whopping 332
, up from 295 last year, which itself was an astonishing 50% hike in just one year from the practice of former president Donald Trump. Trump had a standing order to try to eliminate two federal regulations for each new one created. Still, even before Biden took office, annual regulatory costs to the U.S. economy stood at
$1.927 trillion
, so now, those costs obviously are soaring well above the $2 trillion level. This number even exceeds the total cost to the economy from individual income taxes.
A significant number of Biden’s new rules are aimed at “equity,” which is another way of saying it is using racial identity for social-engineering purposes. Another large proportion of new rules involve “climate change,” even at the Securities and Exchange Commission, even though it has absolutely no legal mandate or role in climate policy.
With all of these costly deterrents to economic growth, it is no wonder that inflation under Biden consistently outstrips wage growth, meaning that ordinary workers’ effective, disposable income has fallen almost every month of his presidency.
The truth is, government busy-bodies usually make things worse, not better. The new Unified Regulatory Agenda should be seen as a comprehensive categorization of harmful policies based on the mistaken belief that government “experts” should rule the roost. Instead, more of them should be roosted out of office.
