Anyone reading President Obama’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled “Toward a 21st-Century Regulatory System” about business and regulation would agree with everything stated in the text. It is true that overlapping regulations that require multiple filings to different agencies is inefficient. It is true that one agency assigning one chemical as toxic while another categorizes it as a safe food makes no sense. No one would deny that all those types of ill-advised or outdated regulations should be removed.
The tone of the Wall Street Journal op-ed however is giving the business community a pass by giving the impression that over regulation is either the genesis of or the cause of our continued economic malaise. Businesses are doing fine. Review their balance sheets. Review their profits.
Businesses are using our economic problems as a tool of extortion. This tool thus far has proven extremely effective. As usual the middle class is left in a state of despair as we provide tax credits on businesses washed in cash and obscene profits as the country suffers, as we acquiesce to corporate mergers, as the distinct possibility of squashing substantive regulations occur, and as policies that allow for depressed wages remain.
The middle class remains willfully uninformed. Progressives can only save this nation if we point out the reason why said state of being misinformed materially affects them and requires action.
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Obama’s Bogus Explanation For Troubles: Too Much Regulation
[email protected] | HuffPost Reporting
Two years after inheriting the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression, President Barack Obama has settled on an unhelpful new explanation for his failure to restore jobs: A surplus of suffocating regulations.
In an op-ed published in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, the president decries how regulations have sometimes "gotten out of balance, placing unreasonable burdens on business — burdens that have stifled innovation and have had a chilling effect on growth and jobs."
In the crudest sense, this is probably wise politics. Pandering to businesses in possession of campaign cash reinforces the advantages of Obama’s incumbency in the run-up to next year’s presidential election. By brazenly stealing a long-established Republican talking point — how geeky Washington bureaucrats are squeezing the life out of American businesses — Obama is speaking to the core distrust of government that prevails in many homes. He is also following through on his pledge to get along better with big business, following his recent summit with prominent chief executives at the White House.
But as a message fed into the policy process, one that helps shape the tone of public discourse, Obama’s words are nothing short of a public disservice. Having failed to marshal an economic program sufficiently muscular to restore vigor to a still-lean economy, the president will not even talk straight about how we got here, instead adding confusion to the narrative that will surely embolden industries hoping to write rules in their favor.
It wasn’t too many regulations that trashed the economy. It was not enough rules — a deficit that owes in large part to the efforts of many of the people Obama has leaned on in putting together his economic policies.
Robert Rubin, who helped Obama during his transition and remains a conspicuous influence at his Treasury Department, persuaded President Bill Clinton to roll back regulations on derivatives, the complex investments at the center of the financial crisis of 2008. Rubin’s protégé, Larry Summers — who recently left the White House, where he oversaw Obama’s economic policy — aided in that effort. Summers and Rubin both played key roles in dismantling the Depression-era walls between Wall Street trading and ordinary banking. These policies enabled a gambling mentality to capture Wall Street, perverting and rerouting the flows of money that are crucial to a healthy real economy.
A host of banking regulators allowed lenders to pump excessive amounts of speculative capital into mortgage markets and complicated derivatives trades while setting aside little in reserve. When crisis struck — as it inevitably does in any market-oriented economy — it was huge enough to take down the real economy.
