The American Action Forum draws our attention to the massive increase in the cost of regulations Americans have experienced over the past year, mostly going into effect this month:
With more than $201 billion in costs, the Biden era to-date far outpaces its predecessors, with more than three times the costs of Obama’s first year and nearly 40 times those of Trump’s. The Biden total, however, only overtook Obama’s due to a massive Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) emission rule (discussed further in the next section) to put it over the edge in the final month. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the Trump Administration lead the administrations in regulatory costs for its first few months, hovering in the low billions of dollars. By the year’s mid-point (“Month 6”), however, both Biden and Obama shot past Trump with cost totals of $16 billion and $27 billion, respectively.
The Biden Administration was also clearly the leader in terms of paperwork totals by year’s end. The 131 million annual hours of paperwork attached to its rules exceeded the Trump and Obama totals by 123 million and 105 million hours, respectively. This was, however, not the result of a year-end surge. Starting at around the middle of the year, the Biden total spiked noticeably and never came close to relinquishing its lead. Overall, the paperwork trends hewed closer to expectations. Outside of “Month 1,” the Trump Administration’s total was consistently far below the others, reaching a high point of 9.2 million hours in “Month 11.”
Click over for the shocking charts. These costs make a difference. They truly are a tax on productivity and economic growth.
It’s worse than that for two reasons. First, regulations implicitly burden smaller entities, benefiting companies that dominate the market. They can more easily skim off a little more profit, slip in a little more cost, or squeeze out a little more savings to cover the additional burden. That is, they have the leverage to pass the costs on to shareholders, customers, and employees or suppliers. These steps only become easier for big companies as their competition flounders.
Second, for the Biden administration to pack on so much new regulatory burden so quickly, special interests must have been ready in the wings and the administration was entirely given over to them. Those interests might be the big businesses or working with them, but whatever the case, anybody who thought Americans elect presidents to serve their interests should rethink.
Featured image by Christa Dodoo on Unsplash.
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His legislation would essentially make every general election a two-stage affair, with the primary being more like what we think of as the general and the general becoming something more like a runoff.
The idea of primaries is to help voters organized into parties find the best candidate within the scope of their party’s definition. That’s a problem in Rhode Island only because the deck is so thoroughly stacked, and Republicans have fallen into a ditch they can’t get out of.
If Corvese wants to find a solution for our multi-candidate elections and ensure that the winner ultimatley has a majority of votes, there are ways to do that without foreclosing the possibility that the GOP could find a workable path.
Perhaps he’s more concerned that the primary system means a progressive might unseat him among Democrats and that unhealth partisanship would prevent his winning as a Republican or Independent even if he would be the most representative candidate on the ballot.
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Buzzwords flow through political and ideological debates — at the state level even more so than the federal — to the extent that one has to wonder whether the people using them really subscribe to the ideas that they represent.
Consider Democrat Representative from Cranston Brandon Potter, tweeting about the city’s decision to permit construction of an AutoZone distribution warehouse and some other commercial spaces:
When a city is severely below its affordable housing obligations, sees people sleeping in tents under a bridge, and builds an AutoZone—rather than housing—right next to them, it’s clear we need state action to hold municipalities accountable.
With the disclaimer that I haven’t familiarized myself extensively with this particular controversy, I’d note that it is not my understanding that the city is building the AutoZone warehouse. Rather:
- Somebody owned or owns this parcel of land.
- Somebody else bought or wants to buy the parcel in order to build some commercial space.
- No competing plan is on the table for a residential (much less specifically affordable-housing) project on that lot.
What Potter and other activists seem to be advocating, therefore, is that the city place a moratorium on any development where affordable housing might go for however long it takes for those projects to come forward. Look at the language of United Way activist Kristina Brown: “we are at a point where every time we lose a parcel that could be used for dense development, we are creating more obstacles for ourselves to bring on the housing the community needs.”
Take note, property owners. It is not your parcel. It is “our” parcel.
Another way Brown could have meant what she said (but didn’t) is that “we,” the activists, lost another opportunity. That wouldn’t be a criticism of the city, but rather a lament at the activists’ inability to compete.
For his part, Potter takes this up a notch. He thinks municipalities are so obviously the true owners of all property within their borders that when they don’t do what the activists think is the right thing, the state government must step in and take over true ownership.
If you’re wondering how, then, property owners and other people in a community can have a say in their communities, the answer in Rhode Island is increasingly that they have to engage in back-room corruption and bare-knuckle political brawls to seize power at the highest level possible. This approach been working out well for the state.
Featured image by Justin Katz.
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This can’t be good:
[Open full post]In the past few months, I have spoken to dozens of parliamentarians, officials and diplomats across Europe who have simply lost faith in American leadership. One very senior British MP told me last week that Biden’s foreign policy was “appalling” and “completely useless”.
And this is coming from America’s closest friend and ally, the UK. With an unashamedly anti-Brexit stance, and an arrogant willingness to lecture Britain on the Northern Ireland Protocol, Biden has succeeded in undermining the Special Relationship.
As for America’s enemies, they see Biden as a soft touch, whose time in office is a welcome opportunity to challenge America’s might and undercut the country’s strategic power. It is no coincidence that, with the former senator from Delaware in the White House, Russian forces are massing on the border of Ukraine, China is openly threatening to invade Taiwan, and Iran is rapidly building up its nuclear program.
It’s difficult to argue with this statement from the stepfather of a young woman who died from a fatal hit-and-run accident:
“When you say you’re going to do something and you document that you’re going to do it and you’re seen doing it, it can’t be an accident anymore. He murdered Olivia and we want him to be held accountable for that,” Olivia’s stepfather, Dennis Molloy, told NBC 10 at the rally.
It’s possible that some technical provision in the law might differentiate killing somebody with intentional disregard for life from murder, but this factor really should escalate the penalties. Speaking of penalties, Rhode Islanders shouldn’t lose track of the need to impose them on the elected officials who created the circumstances that allowed this crash to happen.
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Yes, it’s early in the campaign, but I’m comfortable issuing the declaration in this post’s subject line based on Democrat Governor Dan McKee’s rescission of his historic proclamation recognizing School Choice Week:
Gov. Dan McKee’s office said Tuesday night he hadn’t intended to issue a newly surfaced proclamation as part of a national campaign in praise of “school choice.” …
McKee’s office had not publicized the proclamation prior to the national group’s news release about it. In response to a request from 12 News, the governor’s office on Tuesday shared a copy of the one-page proclamation, dated Jan. 1.
Hours later, however, McKee spokesperson Matt Sheaff said the proclamation should never have been issued.
“The National School Choice Week proclamation was sent out in error with an electronic signature and did not go through the appropriate approval process,” Sheaff said in a statement.
There are really only three possibilities, here. The first two assume that the McKee administration is being honest, in which case either he has such loose (incompetent) control of his own office that his employees are issuing statements on significant issues of public concern in his name without his knowledge or he issued the proclamation according to his beliefs but in contravention of his own policy of having his employees tell him what he should be doing. The third possibility is that they are now lying and the administration knowingly issued the proclamation quietly in an attempt to play both sides and backpedaled (in the wrong direction, morally) when caught.
All of these possibilities are disqualifying. Perhaps worse, politically, the episode goes on a growing list of evidence that, however much his persona may be preferable to those of his opponents, he can’t be trusted actually to stand on principle or to execute principled stands competently. Better to have somebody whose persona is less attractive, but whose policies can be addressed in a more-straightforward manner.
Featured image screen captured from the Coalition Radio Network on YouTube.
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Ellen Liberman’s article in Rhode Island Monthly about police programs using the Flock Safety system is important and timely for a number of reasons:
The “Flock hit” is a reference to the Flock Safety system, a network of time-stamped license plate-reading cameras linked to a vehicle’s make, model, color and distinguishing marks. The image information is instantly checked against information stored in other crime databases, such as the National Crime Information Center, a digital index of “wanted” people and property associated with that plate. The department’s dispatchers and officers get a “hit” when a camera records the passing of a vehicle on a hotlist.
The system is running on a trial basis in Cranston, Pawtucket, and Woonsocket as “an exponential explosion of patrol power.” Making it even more problematic is the way the adoption happened. Cranston resident Michael Beauregard says, “It’s a revolutionary change of policy that went by with no debate or scrutiny until after the fact.”
Beauregard’s concern is related to one I expressed with reference to East Providence’s new school zone speeding cameras. When we (as a citizenry) accept rules and empower police to enforce them, we do so under the conditions as we experience them right now, not under the assumption of perfect enforcement. Catching car thieves and other criminals isn’t something most people would prefer to be loosely enforced, but without public debate at each step, we can’t be sure that the selling points the police proclaim after the fact are the only uses to which the devices are being put.
Another step in thinking is worth taking, here, too. As we live increasingly online — with Facebook going so far as to promote a creepy Metaverse — these surveillance policies have a practical lesson to teach. To the extent you’re living within a program, rather than out in the physical world, perfect enforcement becomes more of a possibility and the question of what will be enforced becomes more urgent.
Featured image by Milan Malkomes on Unsplash.
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In fairness, I don’t think Nicole Solas has it quite right when she calls Moses Brown School “the most expensive private school in Rhode Island. Even without boarding, it looks like St. George’s, St. Andrew’s, Portsmouth Abbey, and the Lincoln School all have Moses Brown beat. But who’s going to quibble over a few thousand dollars when you’re paying around $40,000 or more per year?
Nicole mentions the tuition on her way to sharing a notice to middle-school families at Moses Brown asking parents to “coach” their children not to buy Valentines cards that “feel ‘gender normative'” or “portray only White human characters.” I suppose the reference to “human” is meant to create allowances for white bunnies and that sort of thing.
This isn’t surprising. I’m sure Moses Brown provides some educational advantage over more cost-effective schools in the area, but the overarching value for which parents are paying is induction to the elite, and Marxists’ greatest coup, recently, has been making their poisonous ideology a marker of status.
As counterintuitive as that may seem, one can see the attraction: It’s OK to spend a livable household income on school every year as long as you adopt an ideology that looks down on the culture of those who actually live on that much.
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Remember that massive infrastructure bill that even Republicans supported? Here’s a little tidbit that slipped through unnoticed:
In President Joe Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure law there is a mandate that will require all new vehicles to come equipped with advanced impaired driving technology, to curb the amount of people who get behind the wheel after drinking.
According to the bill, in 2019 there were more than 10,000 drunk driving related fatalities that involved a driver with a blood-alcohol level above the legal limit in the United States. The technology will be able to passively monitor a drivers blood-alcohol level to determine if a driver is impaired or not. The car could prevent or limit someone’s ability to drive under the influence.
At least the RI ACLU’s Steven Brown is willing to go on the record with some concerns, but the two most important ones don’t seem to occur to anybody: the rule of law and the flawed assumptions of competence.
On the first count, it may come as a surprise to younger readers that we used to debate whether the federal government had unlimited power. We used to worry, for example, that abuses of federalist clauses in the Constitution and budgetary bullying were allowing Washington, D.C., to dictate things like seatbelt use and drinking ages. Maybe the policies were good and maybe they weren’t, but how they were implemented mattered. Those concerns appear to have completely evaporated if Congress and the President can simply require that every new car include nanny-state technology that forces us to buy cars that spy on us.
This trend won’t stop with things like blood-alcohol detectors that many Americans might support conceptually.
The second count — the flawed assumptions of competence — is a relatively new one to occur to me, taught as a shouldn’t-have-been-surprising lesson of COVID. Basically, we accept these laws and regulations under the present circumstances and the assumption that the government will be able to execute competently. Using COVID policy as an example, we tolerate policies that require frequent testing and situational masking under the assumption that the government and private suppliers will be able to minimize the inconvenience, but when test results begin taking a week and masks become difficult to find, those policies aren’t revised.
One of my family’s cars has a more-direct example. It has sensors on the tires to alert the driver when the air is critically low. That’s a great feature, but each sensor is an electronic device attached to heavy moving machinery that revolves at high speed in all sorts of outdoor conditions, so one of them is malfunctioning. Enter a supply-chain crisis. We’ve been waiting for about six months for the part.
In this case, the sensor is a matter of convenience, but change the story to a sensor that prevents you from driving your car, and it’s quite a different matter. Imagine if government incompetence, economic surprises, or hostile foreign action were to choke off the supply of parts for this new drunk-driving system. We could find large numbers of Americans unable to drive their cars.
To Biden and his fellow progressives, that’s probably a feature, not a bug, but sane, adult Americans have to consider such possibilities as we adopt technology and, even more, as we allow government to make it mandatory.
Featured image by Bermix Studio on Unsplash.
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