Free Republic

Regulations: With the flick of his magic pen, President Obama will soon grant millions of workers overtime play. At least, that's the fantasy being peddled by the White House and regurgitated by a credulous press.

nvironment: The rogue agency known as EPA has been slapped back by the Supreme Court for failing to consider the cost of a massive new regulation. What else is new?

Patrick McLaughlin of the Virginia-based Mercatus Center released a report recently on the Code of Federal Regulations, which compiles all the rules and regulations promulgated by all the federal government's departments and agencies McLaughlin says it is impossible to understand the rules by reading them. He concludes that since the average adult reads at a rate of 250 to 300 words per minute, it would take nearly three years (5,727 hours) to read the entire 103 million word code (2012 edition, updated annually). “The American regulatory system has no working, systematic process for reviewing regulations for obsolescence or poor performance,”...

Recently, the financial services company Signature Bank announced the appointment of a prominent new board member. Perhaps to the surprise of some, the individual receiving the board seat was none other than the co-author and namesake of one of the nation’s largest and arguably most significant pieces of banking regulation since the Great Depression, former Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Barney Frank. How much can Frank expect to earn for his services? Fortune writes that Signature’s non-employee board members earned approximately $375,000 in cash and stock for their services last year. Rep. Frank was reportedly also granted restricted shares vesting in March...

For the past 11 years, Chief Executive magazine has been polling hundreds of CEOs from across the nation and evaluating state budgetary and economic growth metrics to determine the best and worst states for business. And for the 11th straight year, California has come in dead last. Texas repeated as the best state for business, aided by its lack of corporate or personal income taxes, and Florida, also without an individual income tax, once again finished runner-up. Rounding out the bottom five of the list were New York, Illinois, New Jersey and Massachusetts, which remained unchanged from last year’s survey....

An injunction issued against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by federal judge Leigh Martin May could spell the beginning of the end for Administrative Law Courts and with them, 80 years of unconstitutional abuse of power by the Executive branch. Administrative Law “…allows for the creation of public regulatory agencies and contains all of the statutes, judicial decisions, and regulations that govern them.” These regulatory bodies include the EPA and the SEC. Many came into being during the reign of Franklin Roosevelt, the one president more arrogant and power hungry than Barack Obama. The law itself “…is created by...

Artificial trans fat will have to disappear from the American diet, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The FDA on Tuesday ruled that trans fat is not "generally recognized as safe" for use in human food. The department gave food manufacturers three years to remove the partially hydrogenated oils, or PHOs, from their products. The companies can petition the FDA for a special permit to use it, but no PHOs can be added to human food unless otherwise approved by the FDA. Eating a diet rich in trans fat is linked to higher body weight, heart disease and...

".....There are good reasons why society admires courage and despises cowardice. Fear is one of the primary subjects taught in primary and secondary schools both public and private. Teaching fear to young people is a kind of collective child abuse. We are raising a generation of paranoid neurotics. Our children are being taught, erroneously, that individuals and the environment are delicate and fragile. ....Those who are the most paranoid seem to know the least about the objects of their anxieties. For example, fear of genetically modified foods, glutens, and hydraulic fracturing are based almost solely on complete ignorance of these...

Rules: The day before Memorial Day, the Obama administration released its list of regulations in the pipeline for the next year. Given the price tag involved, it's no surprise that they didn't want anyone to notice it.

After already socking the public, business and the economy with costly regulations, President Obama added another $110 billion in the last half year and is rushing to finish his second term with even more costly environmental rules, according to a taxpayer watchdog."The administration's time in office is coming to a close, so regulators will surely rush to finish its greenhouse gas and ozone standards before the next administration takes power," warned American Action Forum in a new analysis of the administration's latest report of new regulations.Sam Batkins, director of regulatory policy at the Forum, studied the twice-yearly released list of...

Since President Barack Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued 3,373 new final regulations, equaling 29,770 pages in the Federal Register and totaling approximately 29,770,000 words, according to a count of the regulations published in the Federal Register. The Gutenberg Bible is only 1,282 pages and 646,128 words. This means the new EPA regulations issued by the Obama Administration contain 23 times as many pages as the Bible and 46 times as many words. The Federal Register publishes documents, including proposed rules, notices, interim rules, corrections, drafts of final rules and final rules....

Obama To Circumvent Congress With ‘Gag Order’ On Firearm Coverage by AWR Hawkins 7 Jun 2015 On June 1 Breitbart News reported on Obama’s Spring 2015 “Unified Agenda.” The gun control measures contained therein which were to be passed by executive fiat. Since that time Representatives like Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY-4th) have placed riders on a DOJ appropriations bill to stop portions of the executive gun control push in its tracks. Now the NRA-ILA is revealing that the Obama administration is working behind the scenes to stifle reporting on firearms. From the NRA-ILA: Even as news reports have been highlighting...

The bill has arrived for all of President Obama's initiatives, from Obamacare to Dodd-Frank banking regulations to school lunches, and state and local governments are choking on the costs and paperwork mandated to comply with new laws, according to a new analysis. The tab: $35 billion in unfunded regulatory costs and at least 75 million hours of paperwork, according to American Action Forum, the center-right policy institute headed by former Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin. Obamacare is the biggest pain to state and local governments. The report said that just one element of the health "reform" costs states 27.1...

Michigan law is tilted so much in favor of traditional auto dealers that the staff of the Federal Trade Commission considers it anti-competitive, and has now said so in writing. Earlier this year, Sen. Darwin Booher, R-Evart, introduced Senate Bill 268, which would slightly dent a state-imposed prohibition against direct-to-consumer sales of motor vehicles by allowing autocycle manufacturers to sell new vehicles directly to consumers. Seeking input on the measure, Booher contacted the FTC and asked for comment. In response, the staff of the FTC’s Office of Policy Planning, Bureau of Competition, and Bureau of Economics, said that Senate Bill...

Companies in the United States are now facing more than twice as much litigation as companies in other countries. That’s the disturbing finding of a survey recently conducted by the third-largest law firm in the world. The firm, Norton Rose Fulbright, which happens to be the largest law firm in the world based outside the US, conducted a poll of more than 800 corporate counsel representing companies across 26 countries, and the results are not good for American companies or the job seekers who would like to work for them. While the survey is performed to identify litigation trends across...

Monday's edition of the Federal Register contains new rules for government-sponsored school meal programs, disclosing the compensation of senior executives at certain banks, and acquisitions regulations for government agencies. Here's what is happening: Global warming: The Obama administration is proposing new acquisitions regulations for the Department of Defense, General Services Administration and National Aeronautics and Space Administration. These federal agencies will try to procure materials that do not contain high global warming potential hydrofluorocarbons. "This will allow agencies to better meet the greenhouse gas emission reduction goals and reporting requirements," the agencies wrote. The public has 60 days to comment....

“The rights of private persons amongst democratic nations are commonly of small importance…the consequence is, that they are often sacrificed without regret, and almost always violated without remorse. But it happens that, at the same period and amongst the same nations in which men conceive a natural contempt for the rights of private persons, the rights of society at large are naturally extended and consolidated”, wrote Alexis De Tocqueville in Democracy In America. “In other words”, writes Tocqueville, “men become less attached to private rights just when it is most necessary to retain and defend what little remains of them.”...

I used to think if we had five Nino [Antonin] Scalias or five Clarence Thomases on the [Supreme] Court that we could make a lot of progress. And I have been disabused of that notion for the following reason: There were a series of four or five Supreme Court decisions from 1937 to 1943 which changed — well, changed isn’t the right word — unleashed the government from the constrictions of the Constitution. It unleashed them from being stuck with the enumerated powers, it redefined the Commerce Clause to mean manufacturing and agriculture even if it only has indirect effects...

Government: The private economy might be moribund, but the regulatory economy is doing quite well, thank you very much. Could it be that the two are somehow related?

Original headline-Report: Cost of Federal Regulation Reached $1.88 Trillion in 2014 U.S. debt exceeds the size of China’s economy The cost of federal regulation neared $2 trillion in 2014, according to a new report by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State, a report by Clyde Wayne Crews, CEI’s vice president for policy, also reveals that the U.S. debt now exceeds the size of China’s economy. “Federal regulation and intervention cost American consumers and businesses an estimated $1.88 trillion in 2014 in lost economic productivity and higher prices,” amounting to roughly...