CEI Today: Margaret Thatcher, net neutrality, and reg reform

MARGARET THATCHER - IAIN MURRAY

American Spectator: The Lady Wasn’t for Turning

Mrs. Thatcher recognized the great error of socialism. As she put it,
the trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money. She proposed a twofold solution. First, stop spending other people’s money. Second, give them the opportunity to earn it. In short, she sought to reintroduce liberal capitalism to the country that had once been at its vanguard — from the repeal of the Corn Laws to the Industrial Revolution.

Yet her one failure — to bring harmony to Britain’s raucous polity — is in fact a testament to her success. Let me explain.  > Read more

> Interview Iain Murray

NET NEUTRALITY Today! 9:45AM - 11:15AM Rayburn House Office Bldg What's Next for Net Neutrality & the Internet? A Discussion & Debate The Obama Administration’s Network Neutrality order awaits a late summer or early fall D.C. Circuit Court ruling on its legality. What does all of this mean for the future of all things Internet? Emcee: Seton Motley - President, Less Government Discussers & Debaters: Phil Kerpen - President, American Commitment Ryan Radia - Competitive Enterprise Institute --- Gigi Sohn - President, Public Knowledge Sascha Meinrath - Vice President, New America Foundation

OBAMA BUDGET & REG REFORM - WAYNE CREWS Forbes: Congress Returns To Battle Gun Control, Immigration--And A Fat New Obama Federal Budget Congress returned to Washington this week amid disappointing jobs data. Worse, multitudes that exited the workforce altogether aren’t even officially counted anymore. Economic recovery should be our absolute priority. Now approaching $2 trillion annually, the “hidden tax” of federal regulation stands at over half the level of spending the president will propose. We need far fuller accounting for government’s presence in the economy than Obama’s budget: a regulatory budget to supplement the fiscal one. > Read the full commentary > Interview Wayne Crews

More in the news... Health “Advocates”: Tax And Regulate Responsible Drinkers Protectionist Law Proposed In New York Would Hit Wine Consumers Hardest JOBS Act — What’s Been Implemented — Is Working; Now Implement The Rest!

CEI ANNUAL DINNER & GALA FEATURING THE HONORABLE RAND PAUL JUNE 20, 2013 cei.org/ceidinner

CEI is a non-profit, non-partisan public policy group dedicated to the principles of free enterprise and limited government.  For more information about CEI, please visit our website, cei.org, and blogs, Globalwarming.org and OpenMarket.org.  Follow CEI on Twitter! Twitter.com/ceidotorg.

CEI Today: Regulatory Reduction Commission, Harvard rejects oil, and investigating the EPA

REG REFORM - WAYNE CREWS & RYAN YOUNG

The Washington Times: Federal rules cost $10,000 per employee, Cut economy-strangling regulations

After President Obama issued executive orders in 2011 directing agencies to trim a small amount of regulatory fat, the Progressive Policy Institute’s Michael Mandel issued a report proposing a bipartisan Regulatory Improvement Commission to aid the process. It would be tasked with finding obsolete or harmful regulations worthy of repeal. It then would send its recommendations to Congress, which would vote on them as a package, up or down, without amendment.

It’s a good idea, with roots going back nearly 20 years. The first formal proposal for creating such a commission was Mr. Gramm's Commission on Regulatory Relief and Rollback legislation in 1995. > View the full commentary at Washingtontimes.com

> Interview Wayne Crews or Ryan Young

HARVARD REJECTS OIL - MARLO LEWIS Globalwarming.org: “Harvard Needs Remedial Energy Math” — Robert Bryce Environmental activist Bill McKibben and his organization, 350.org, are on a ”Do the Math” tour in which they urge colleges and universities to “divest their endowments, estimated at a total of $400 billion nationwide, from the fossil fuel industry.” About 33% of global energy comes from oil, which is indispensable to transportation. Most of those voting to Go Fossil Free probably did not walk or bike from home to Harvard. As Steven Colbert asked McKibben, a Vermont native, during a Washington, D.C. protest rally against the Keystone XL Pipeline: How did you get down here? Did you ride your bicycle? Did you ride ox cart? ”Or do you have a vehicle that runs on hypocrisy?”  > View the full commentary at Globalwarming.org > Interview Marlo Lewis

INVESTIGATION OF EPA - CHRISTOPHER HORNER EPA IG to Investigate Agency Email Practices EPA's Inspector General is looking into the agency's email practices in the wake of a scandal involving agency administrator Lisa Jackson's use of private email accounts and aliases to conduct official business. We at CEI welcome the inquiry and hope for a credible process and report, but we need to be realistic about the problem. We found out about Lisa Jackson’s false identity only because we stumbled across an obscure EPA memo that admitted the “alias” accounts had been created by former administrator Carol Browner, who ordered her hard drive and backup tapes erased and had her email accounts set on auto-delete. In other words, everything about these accounts, from their origin forward, screamed abuse, and controls were supposedly instituted. EPA promised to address all of this after a Government Accountability Office inquiry. But it has not. > View more on this story at CEI.org > Interview Christopher Horner

More in the news... Green Building: More Expensive And Less Efficient No Long-Term Trend in Frequency, Strength of Landfalling Hurricanes Moderate Republican, Dem lawmakers plan to expand the FDA

CEI is a non-profit, non-partisan public policy group dedicated to the principles of free enterprise and limited government.  For more information about CEI, please visit our website, cei.org, and blogs, Globalwarming.org and OpenMarket.org.  Follow CEI on Twitter! Twitter.com/ceidotorg.

CEI Today: Pay disparity, Taxpayer Protection Pledge, Obama recess appointments, and bipartisan reg reform

PUBLIC & PRIVATE SECTOR PAY DISPARITY - MATT PATTERSON

Ocean State Current: Public Employee Pay and Benefits Draw Historical Comparison with Corruption in Roman Empire

The incestuous relationship that exists between union officials and the elected officials they help put into office deserves greater attention and scrutiny, Matt Patterson, a labor policy analyst with the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) in Washington, D.C., told the Current.

“The pay disparity between public and private sector workers is one of the great unreported injustices in America,” Patterson said.

“Government-worker unions help hire, make that hire, their own bosses: politicians, who are then unsurprisingly inclined to grant their benefactors generous wage and benefit packages with taxpayer dollars. It’s a little like the later stages of the Roman Empire, when the army would install as Emperor whichever general the soldiers thought would reward them the best. Then as now, such a bargain is a recipe for corruption and incompetence.”  > View the news story on Oceanstatecurrent.com

> Interview Matt Patterson

 

COALITION DEFENDS TAXPAYER PROTECTION PLEDGE In response to an all-out assault by the media and even some in Congress on the Taxpayer Protection Pledge lawmakers signed promising they would not raise taxes, a coalition of national and state policy groups sent a letter to GOP lawmakers on Wednesday that urges them to honor their pledge to taxpayers and refuse to raise taxes. > View the coalition letter

NLRB & OBAMA RECESS APPOINTMENTS - HANS BADER Openmarket.org: Appeals Court Hears Challenge To Obama Administration Power Grab Over NLRB This morning, the D.C. Circuit heard oral arguments in Noel Canning v. NLRB, which includes a challenge to President Obama’s “recess” appointment of two National Labor Relations Board members last January, when the Senate was technically in session, not in recess, and the purported “recess” was very brief, even in the eyes of those who claim there was a “recess.” The Obama administration takes an incredibly expansive interpretation of [the Recess Appointments Clause], arguing that he can appoint officials without the Senate’s consent, not only during any recess, no matter how brief (not just “the” recess between sessions), but also to fill any appointment, regardless of whether the vacancy arose during a recess. Past court rulings have stretched the reach of the Recess Appointments Clause, but never this far.> Read the full commentary on Openmarket.org > Interview Hans Bader

REG REFORM - WAYNE CREWS Openmarket.org: Beyond The Fiscal Cliff, Bipartisan Regulatory Reform If I’m reading this right, the Progressive Policy Institute wants to roll back some over-regulation. It’s not clear how much, but it does seem to be a visible amount. The PPI’s February 2011 policy report, Reviving Jobs and Innovation: a Progressive Approach to Improving Regulation, calls for a Regulatory Improvement Commission to weed out regulations that have accumulated like “barnacles.” The breakthrough is the bipartisan recognition the federal rulemaking process knows how to add but not subtract.  > View the full commentary at Openmarket.org   > Interview Wayne Crews

More in the news... Victory For Small Business: Lawsuit-Spawning Disabilities Rights Treaty Blocked The Temperance Movement Is Alive And Well When Gridlock Is Good Anti-Immigration Group Repudiates Free Market Principles If You Can’t Beat Him, Join Together

CEI is a non-profit, non-partisan public policy group dedicated to the principles of free enterprise and limited government.  For more information about CEI, please visit our website, cei.org, and blogs, Globalwarming.org and OpenMarket.org.  Follow CEI on Twitter! Twitter.com/ceidotorg.

CEI Today: Public cynicism over Congress, reg reform/sunset, and union de-authorization

HIGHWAY BILL - IAIN MURRAY & MARC SCRIBNER

Openmarket.org: Worst Congress Ever?

It's no surprise that 60 percent of Americans, according to a new poll from Public Policy Polling for the leftist Daily Kos website, think that the current Congress is the worst ever. Of course, we don't expect the Daily Kos to note that most of the problem comes from an obstructionist Senate leadership that refuses to put anything passed by the House to a vote. However, when Congress does act in a bipartisan fashion it tends just to make things worse (with rare exceptions like the recent JOBS Act).

A prime example is the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21), also known as the highway bill, a two-year reauthorization of surface transportation spending that passed in late June. Once it was enacted, special interests put on their best jilted-lover act, wailing about not receiving every handout they had requested. > Read the full commentary at Spectator.org

> Interview Iain Murray/Marc Scribner

 

REG REFORM - RYAN YOUNG & DAVID DEERSON Real Clear Policy: How to Get Rid of Unnecessary Regulations You can’t avoid death and taxes. Unless you’re a government agency, in which case, you gain immortality from other peoples’ tax dollars. More than 3,500 new regulations from 60 or so agencies hit the books every year, but almost none are repealed. There are hundreds more agencies that don’t issue regulations, but run spending programs and give subsidies to private businesses. This problem has many possible solutions. It is well past time to try at least one of them: automatic sunsets for new regulations.  A federal sunset law would be difficult to implement since a lot of vested interests will fight very hard to keep their nests feathered. > Read the full commentary on Real Clear Policy >Interview Ryan Young/David Deerson

UNION DE-AUTHORIZATION - RUSS BROWN Forbes.com: A Deep Secret That Labor Unions Don't Want Workers to Know Labor unions often claim to favor democracy in the workplace in principle, but in practice is another story. Big Labor’s recent push for the so-called Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would have allowed unions to circumvent secret ballot elections through card check organizing, is one major example. EFCA failed in Congress, but rules for voting a union out still heavily favor union bosses over workers. Unless this changes, union bosses will continue to undermined American workers’ freedom of association. However, workers have an option they should know about. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) has a provision that may be the best kept secret in labor law. Known as de-authorization, it allows workers to opt out of joining a union as a condition of employment.  > Read the full commentary on Forbes.com >Interview Russ Brown

Also featuring... On Robert Pattinson, Cosmopolis, And The Folly of National Film Agencies “They’re Taking Our Medals!” My Fox News Interview On GM’s Losses To Taxpayers And Obama’s Auto Dealer Job Shaft California’s Unconstitutional Proposition 37

Severe drought in the Midwest has driven corn prices to record levels. Policy Analyst Brian McGraw argues that ending the federal government’s ethanol mandate could help families who are struggling to pay their heightened grocery bills. Under the mandate, nearly 40 percent of this year’s corn crop will be used for fuel instead of food. > Listen to the podcast

CEI is a non-profit, non-partisan public policy group dedicated to the principles of free enterprise and limited government.  For more information about CEI, please visit our website, cei.org, and blogs, Globalwarming.org and OpenMarket.org.  Follow CEI on Twitter! Twitter.com/ceidotorg.

CEI Today: Hansen's global warming claims, Romney & Obama on reg reform, and Bloomberg v teacher unions

GLOBAL WARMING - MARLO LEWIS

Globalwarming.org: Hansen’s Study: Did Global Warming Cause Recent Extreme Weather Events?

A study by NASA’s James Hansen and two colleagues, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), finds that during the past 30 years, extreme hot weather has become more frequent and affects a larger area of the world than was the case during the preceding 30 years.

There’s just one small problem. The reseachers do not examine any of those events to assess the relative contributions of natural climate variability and global warming. The study provides no event-specific evidence that the record-setting heat waves or droughts would not have occurred in the absence of warming, or would not have broken records in the absence of warming. >Read the full commentary on Globalwarming.org

>Interview Marlo Lewis

PRESIDENTAL CAMPAIGN & REG REFORM - WAYNE CREWS Forbes.com: The Least Sexy But Most Urgent Economic Reform Remains Ignored In The Presidential Campaign Go ahead and promise to cut spending to the bone and balance the federal budget besides. Knock yourself out in the presidential and congressional campaigns on fiscal themes, and this economy still can’t grow in the way needed, which I contend is a doubling of GDP within a generation or so, the way the U.S. used to surge and create jobs. The “hidden tax” of regulation now totals over $1.8 trillion in compliance costs and economic effects, according to my forthcoming informal roundup (it’s called Tip of the Costberg: On the Invalidity of All Regulatory Cost Estimates and the Need to Compile Them Anyway). That’s half the size of the federal spending budget itself, and almost totally hidden as far as any official acknowledgment is concerned.   > Read the full commentary on Forbes.com >Interview Wayne Crews

MAYOR BLOOMBERG v TEACHER UNIONS - MATT PATTRSON Openmarket.org: Teachers Unions Defend Institutional Incompetence No good deed goes unpunished. Take Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s brave decision to lay off 3,600 employees — including teachers and principals — of 24 of New York City’s worst-performing schools, all with an eye toward rebooting them with new staff, management plans, and curricula. With the state appellate courts out of session, and the new school year rapidly approaching, the fired employees of the 24 schools — all of which have a graduation rate under 60 percent, and some as low 39 percent — will now likely be unfired, and thousands of children will be subjected once again to the indifference and incompetence of teachers shielded from accountability by the UFT protection racket. >Read the full commentary on Openmarket.org >Interview Matt Patterson

Also featuring... When Violations Of The Law Have No Remedy: The Case Of Warrantless Wiretapping Big-wind Boondoggle Supported by Big-spending Republicans

Deal: Stealing You Blind book just $8 (or so) on Amazon! Get your copy today!

CEI is a non-profit, non-partisan public policy group dedicated to the principles of free enterprise and limited government.  For more information about CEI, please visit our website, cei.org, and blogs, Globalwarming.org and OpenMarket.org.  Follow CEI on Twitter! Twitter.com/ceidotorg.