Regulatory reform falls into the category of boring-but-important topics that should be a priority for any presidential candidate but rarely are. Boring, because it inevitably requires one to delve into wonky details of rulemaking processes in a slew of federal agencies that not man probably don’t care about all that much, but important because of the massive, mostly unseen costs that regulation imposes on businesses and the economy: The total annual price tag for federal regulation is an estimated $1.9 trillion, and it effectively costs the average household about $15,000 a year.
Today, GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush released a framework plan to streamline the federal regulatory process in order to mitigate at least some of that burden: According to a campaign document, Bush’s proposal, in combination with his tax reform plan, would raise the income of a family of four earning $50,000 by about $3,100 annually, and increase GDP by about 3 percent over a decade. Estimating the cost of regulation—which in a lot of cases means trying to figure out what would have happened in the absence of certain rules is notoriously difficult to do with any precision, and campaign documents are likely to err toward suggesting a bigger impact, but still, that’s a big enough effect that it’d be noticeable even the plan only got us half way there.
Bush’s new policy paper, “The Regulatory Crisis in Washington,” includes a lot of examples of regulation gone awry—everything from big stuff, like the two-tiered banking system that Dodd-Frank helped cement in place and the burdens the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau places to comparatively small ball, like Food and Drug Administration rules that effectively prohibit Americans from buying sunscreen that’s safe and available all over the rest of the world. It also includes a variety of policy proposals, each of which falls into one of three broader goals: Scaling back existing regulation and promoting smarter regulation in the future, making regulators accountable to the public rather than to special interests, and reducing red tape in order to spur business dynamism.
Read the full article at Reason.com: Jeb Bush's Plan to Regulate the Regulators
