Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Monday, March 15, 2004

Questions about the effectiveness, if not the destructiveness and counter-productiveness of burdensome regulations that have piled up over the years, have led the Bush administration to conduct a government-wide review. The idea is to determine whether such regulations have crippled the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturers.

An AP story on this survey noted that U.S. manufacturers have been hardest hit by the last recession. As NewsMax.com has reported, claims of 2 million to 3 million jobs lost under President Bush are simply not true, mainly because areas of the biggest job growth are not even being counted at all.

Despite this, however, stories of huge “job losses” that are repeated over and over again leave the public with the impression, however erroneous, that there has been a net loss of millions of jobs in the past three years, even though the unemployment level is at 5.6 percent, the same level when Bill Clinton was campaigning for re-election in 1996 on the platform of a strong economy.

Thus, the administration seeks to comb through the 10,000 regulations that have been adopted since 1980, when the Office of Management and Budget began to keep records.

In an interview and follow-up e-mail correspondence with NewsMax.com, Dr. John D. Graham, director of OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, cited as a good example of “an outdated regulatory program” the Corporate Average Fuel Economy program covering mileage of automobiles and light trucks.

“Although well intentioned to save fuel,” Graham says, “this program achieves only limited fuel savings while increasing safety risks and placing American jobs at risk.” So affirms a 2001 report by the National Academy of Sciences, to which Graham refers.

Therein lies a hot-button issue with radical environmentalists who support the Democrats or Ralph Nader.

One only needs to recall the outraged speeches on Capitol Hill in the 1980s (Teddy Kennedy and Howard Metzenbaum come to mind) excoriating the Reagan administration for not implementing harsher CAFE standards.

More recently, environmental activists have harassed Americans who have, like John Kerry, exercised their freedom of choice to buy and drive sport utility vehicles rather than the unsafe small automobiles to which Graham indirectly alludes.

This activists have almost made a secular religion out of the supposed virtue of driving vulnerable pill boxes on wheels.

AP quoted Graham as saying, “The U.S. manufacturing industry is hindered by regulations that don’t account for improvements in science and technology over the last 20 years.”

A report by the National Association of Manufacturers has argued that about 22 percent of U.S. labor costs are putting U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage to foreign companies and that regulator costs can be as high as $8,000 a worker.

Graham told NewsMax that the White House was not focusing on the rules of the so-called “independent” agencies (FCC, for example), but rather those “regulators in the Cabinet agencies and the EPA,” without resorting to “any need for passing complex legislation in the Congress.”

Editor's note: