This Thanksgiving week we were barraged with Black Friday ads by retailers trumpeting how they’re slashing prices. The Obama Administration had some Black Friday surprises in store for us, too—except they were hoping we’d all be in a post holiday tryptophan-induced haze.
According to The Daily Caller’s Michael Bastasch:
The federal Unified Agenda is the Obama administration’s regulatory road map, and it lays out thousands of regulations being finalized in the coming months. Under President Barack Obama, there has been a tradition of releasing the agenda late on Friday — and right before a major holiday.
…the White House may have a good reason to do so because its Unified Agenda for fall 2014 includes some 3,415 regulations– more than the last regulatory agenda, and one that includes 189 rules that cost more than $100 million.
New regs include EPA greenhouse gas emissions mandates that will be finalized next year. Another one is the EPA’s coal ash rule, projected to cost the power sector more than $20 billion. Amendments to the Clean Water Act will also threaten private property rights even more than before. These costly environmental regs have been criticized from both sides of the aisle for greatly expanding the EPA’s power, killing jobs, and not being effective approaches.
But under-the-radar EPA mandates aren’t the only new rules headed our way. As Investor’s Business Daily reports:
If you thought President Obama was skirting the Constitution with his amnesty for 5 million illegal immigrants, consider that almost none of these new rules he's pushing have been approved by Congress.
These are powers asserted by the executive branch's alphabet soup of rule-making agencies. Unelected bureaucrats make the rules; you live by them.
The new edicts include everything from the Obama administration's bid to regulate the Internet to the kind of light bulbs you can buy to a requirement that restaurants post the calories on Big Macs, pizzas and muffins.
These new Menu Labeling Standards would apply to hundreds of thousands of small restaurants, with a cost estimated as high as $4,000 per store.
The Office of Management and Budget found that the Food and Drug Administration's proposed rules alone would impose one of the largest burdens of any regulation issued since 2010 and could require more than 14 million compliance hours.
Maybe the feds will call this a "jobs program." …
Shame on the White House for imposing such burdens on employers and families when finances are tight and jobs still scarce. Shame on Congress for letting it happen.
In January the new Congress should pass the Reins Act. It requires congressional approval of all new regulations costing more than $100 million. It should do so, then cut the budgets of agencies that don't comply.
Last time we checked, Congress still has the power of the purse. It should start using it.
And, last time I checked, the American people have the power to ensure they do.