This is fantastic news for businesses! The Obama administration now has finished its review of onerous business regulations, and
will be scrapping hundreds of them to save just $10 billion dollars. This shows fiscal restraint and full concern for our corporate businesses that have struggled for so long against regulations imposed upon them by the government.
VINEYARD HAVEN, Mass. — The White House is revealing plans to save businesses $10 billion by scrapping hundreds of government regulations found to be outdated, unfair or unnecessary.
Administration officials say the savings will be realized over a five-year period. The plan was described Tuesday by Cass Sunstein, administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, in a column in the Wall Street Journal in advance of a formal announcement as President Barack Obama vacations at Martha's Vineyard, Mass.
Will this help win over businesses to the WH's side? At this point, it's not clear since the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is saying that the Obama WH scrapped the wrong regulations.
Certain railroad cars won't have to install expensive technology, hospitals will be able to skip a round of federal paperwork and low-risk travelers to the U.S. will enjoy expedited entry, officials said. Some businesses will be allowed to file federal forms electronically.
The administration estimates that about a dozen of the changes will save businesses some $10 billion over five years, with other smaller initiatives adding to the total.
....
The changes are welcome, but don't appear to go far enough, said Bill Kovacs, a senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "Each of the proposals seems to be efficient, technical changes, but it doesn't make any impact on the overall regulatory burdens that exist on the business community," he said.
Mr. Kovacs said he'd like to make it easier for businesses to obtain environmental clearances and harder for environmental lawsuits to delay projects. But he praised the administration for encouraging more electronic filing of official paperwork, and for doing the review in the first place. Congress directed successive administrations to review regulations on the books since 1980, but this is the first White House to do it, he said.
This may be designed to give President Obama talking points to use against whoever the Republican nominee is in the presidential election, but even with that, the Republican nominee will echo the comments made by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in saying that the regulations didn't go far enough. And we don't yet have a full list of which regulations were scrapped that may have been important, and some of those regulatory changes are rather interesting:
An additional $4 billion will come from reducing reporting requirements for health providers and hospitals.
The DOL change will simplify hazard warnings, saving $2.5 billion, while the Transportation Department is relaxing rules on railroads.
The IRS is simplifying and streamlining reporting rules for stock market transactions, an effort the White House says will allow Americans to spend 55 million fewer hours complying with the tax code in 2011. According to current estimates, taxpayers and businesses currently spend around 6 billion hours a year on tax compliance.
The changes also involve speeding payments to small contractors doing business with the Pentagon, Sunstein said.
I'm not saying that changing some onerous regulations is bad, but the mere fact of us doing this shows just how far to the right we have gotten when we should be talking about increasing regulations on major corporations to make them accountable to American consumers. I just don't see us playing the offense on this topic by giving into right-wing framing about business regulations. And that's rather disappointing.
Those are my own thoughts for what they're worth.