CEI Today: $1.75 trillion regulations, STOCK Act, highway bill and more

Wednesday, February 8, 2012
In the News Today

Media Contacts: Christine Hall 202.331.2258 Nicole Ciandella 202.331.2773 CEI Experts by Issue Advancing Capitalism Constitutional and Legal Issues Energy and Environment Finance and Entrepreneurship Health and Safety Labor Nanny State Regulatory Reform Tech and Telecom Trade and International Transportation   Also featuring... CEI IN THE NEWS THE "FRED WEEKLY" February 2, 2012: McDonald's and Pepsi's Different Response to Pressure CEI Podcast for February 2, 2012: The FDA’s Latest Power Grab Fellow in Consumer Policy Studies Michelle Minton breaks down the FDA’s behind-the-scenes push to regulate dietary supplements nearly as strictly as prescription drugs. >Listen at Libertyweek.org

REGULATION - WAYNE CREWS & RYAN YOUNG Investors.com:Regulation Without Representation Regulatory agencies enact more than 3,500 new regulations in an average year. A new federal rule hits the books roughly every two hours, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Compare that with Congress, which passes fewer than 200 pieces of legislation per year. Only Congress has the power to legislate in the American system of government, but Congress never actually votes on most regulations. This is regulation without representation, and it is a major problem. Regulation without representation is a major reason why the Code of Federal Regulations has ballooned to 157,000 pages and counting. It makes it far more difficult to do business and is slowing economic recovery. The total cost of federal regulations last year was over $1.75 trillion, according to economists Nicole and Mark Crain in a report for the Small Business Administration. This well exceeds the $1.5 trillion budget deficit that has gotten so much more attention. > Read the full Investor's Business Daily commenary   > Interview Wayne Crews or Ryan Young  IMMIGRATION - ALEX NOWRASTEH CEI.org - Immigration Tariffs Are Cost-Effective Solution to Illegal Immigration Problem:New Study Makes Case for Free-Market Immigration Reform Washington, D.C., February 7, 2012 – In a new CEI OnPoint, Immigration Policy Analyst Alex Nowrasteh proposes an innovative solution to our nation’s immigration problems: immigration tariffs. Currently, the flow of immigrants into America is managed by bureaucratic federal agencies that set arbitrary quotas for green cards and work visas through lotteries, arcane bureaucratic processes, and adherence to rules that are especially ill-suited to a modern economy. Instead, Nowrasteh argues, the government should set up a tariff schedule that allows immigrants to pay the federal government to legally enter the U.S. job market. > View the OnPoint & summary on cei.org, The Conservative Case for Immigration Tariffs: A Market Based, Humane Approach to Solving Illegal Immigration > Interview Alex Nowrasteh > Watch Alex Nowrasteh on CPAC's immigration panel, Saturday, February 11, 9:50am   TRADE - FRAN SMITH CEI.org -Comments Submitted to U.S.-EU High Level Working Group on Jobs and Growth CEI trade policy expert Fran Smith submitted comments to a US-EU working group on how to stimulate job and economic growth.  She urges specific reforms, such as removing tariffs and non-tariff trade barriers, rejecting regulatory harmonization, and freezing anti-trust regulation: The path to economic growth and prosperity is not something readily planned from above but rather is “discovered” by experimentation and experience. Markets are a discovery process – it is not evidence a priori which polices do or do not foster growth and employment. The two primary models are the “harmonization” model of seeking to “standardize” rules between those seeking mutually beneficial trading partners and the “competitive” model which seeks to have each party experiment with rules to determine which are superior. Which approach is superior is not always clear. The “harmonization” approach can easily morph into a “cartelization” path – enriching some within the two blocs but harming the overall economies of both. The “competitive” model can needlessly increase the transaction costs of trade. In this context, let me discuss the question raised in this proceeding. I have some sympathies for both paths; however, as will be obvious, my belief is that the “harmonization” approach is far less likely to advance economic growth. Politics is too uncertain a process to allow top-down rules to become dominant. > Read the full document on cei.org > Interview Fran Smith More commentary from CEI FINANCIAL REGULATION John Berlau on the controversial STOCK Act before Congress this week:The STOCK Act’s Muzzle — How “Insider Trading” Bill Could Shut Down Grassroots Communication TRANPORTATION - HIGHWAY BILL Marc Scribner on the highway bill before Congress this week: House GOP’s Misguided “Drilling for Roads” Highway Bill Heads to Floor Vote LABOR POLICY Keystone and the Unions by Vincent Vernuccio and Matthew Patterson forThe American Spectator, February 7, 2012 Stealth unionization - view Vincent Vernuccio on Fox Business Varney & Co., February 7, 2012 ENERGY & GLOBAL WARMING The Great Delusion by Matthew Patterson for Globalwarming.org, February 7, 2012 All Those Billions, Blowing in the Wind by Marita Noon for Globalwarming.org, February 7, 2012 Stop the Presses! Lowering a Soviet-style Production Quota for Biodiesel Hurts Biodiesel Industry by William Yeatman for Globalwarming.org   CEI AT CPAC! CEI is a co-sponsor of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Thursday, February 9 to Saturday, February 11 in Washington, D.C. CEI will have a table in the exhibit hall of the hotel, the Marriot Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, DC.  Please stop by booth 1509 and say hello if you are attending CPAC. > Book CEI experts on Radio Row. > See CEI Speakers at CPAC: CPAC panel featuring Sam Kazman: The Red Tape War: How the Regulatory Burden and Growing Nanny State Threaten Prosperity Thursday, February 09, 2012 10:00 - 11:00 am Room "Wilson C" CPAC panel featuring Vincent Vernuccio: Return of Big Labor: What Can We Learn from Wisconsin & Ohio? Thursday, February 09, 2012 11:15 am – 12:00 pm Marshall Ballroom CPAC panel featuring Fred L. Smith, Jr. & Myron Ebell: The Obama EPA's Green Assault on American Jobs Thursday, February 09, 2012 4:15 - 5:00 pm Marshall Ballroom CPAC panel featuring Ryan Radia: Digital Liberty: Tying Government's Hands on Tech, Telecom, and the Web Friday, February 10, 2012 2:30 - 3:30 pm Maryland Room   CPAC panel featuring Alex Nowrasteh: Immigration - High Fences, Wide Gates: States vs. the Feds, the Rule of Law & American Identity Saturday, February 11, 2012 9:50 - 10:50 am Marriott Ballroom Visit Conservative.org/cpac for the full conference agenda. Ten Thousand Commandments By Wayne Crews Welcome to The Other National Debt -- The Cost of Regulation -> Read Today's Decrees 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.

U.S. House Transportation Committee Chairman Mica & Rep. Guinta to meet w/NH transportation leaders in Manchester on Friday 9/30

House Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica & Rep. Frank Guinta to talk jobs & infrastructure with NH transportation leaders in Manchester on Fri. 9/30 

U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman John Mica (R, FL) and Rep. Frank Guinta (R, NH) will discuss jobs and transportation issues with New Hampshire industry officials and elected leaders in Manchester on Friday morning, September 30.  The meeting comes in the wake of Tropical Storm Irene’s damage to roads and bridges in the Mt. Washington Valley and as transportation officials make winter preparations for roads and highways.  

Rep. Guinta serves on the important Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and is a member on the Subcommittee on Aviation, Subcommittee on Highway and Transit, and Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation. 

WHO:                 Chairman John Mica and Rep. Frank Guinta

WHAT:               Roundtable with NH transportation officials

WHEN:               10:30 a.m.   Friday, September 30th

WHERE:            Congressman Frank Guinta’s District Office

33 Lowell Street, Manchester NH

CEI Daily - Medical Devices, Capital Bikeshare, and the CEI Podcast

Medical Devices

The FDA has approved a device to help doctors' detect skin cancer.

Senior Fellow Greg Conko explains what happened.

 

"In March 2010 and again last November, the FDA rejected approval for a new medical device designed to help doctors detect cancerous skin lesions caused by melanoma, even though the agency’s scientific advisory board voted in favor of approval both times. But yesterday, the manufacturer, Mela Sciences, announced that the FDA had reversed course and agreed that the device is in fact approvable — pending agreement on labeling and the compilation of an appropriate user manual for physicians.That’s good news. About 70,000 people are diagnosed with melanoma in the U.S. every year, and nearly 9,000 die from it. But it is nearly 100 percent curable if detected early."

 

 

Capital Bikeshare

 

Last week, the D.C. Capital Bikeshare program celebrated its one-year anniversary.

 

Policy Analyst Marc Scribner comments.

 

"The Capital Bikeshare bikes cost around $1,000 a piece and have a life cycle of six years. Annual operating costs are somewhere closer to $2,000 per bike. In the past two years, I have spent approximately $500 on my personal bike that I commute to work on daily — $250 a year. And I average more trips per day and distance per trip than Capital Bikeshare. The program’s costs given the benefits are simply absurd. If the District’s transportation elite must maintain their warped set of priorities and subsidize cycling to induce ridership, why not instead offer vouchers to partially cover the initial purchase and annual maintenance of a bike? It would certainly be cheaper, although that would take the look-at-the-shiny-objects-we-wasted-tax-dollars-on fun out of the whole thing."

 

 

CEI Podcast

 

In the new CEI podcast, Director of CEI's Center for Investors and Entrepreneurs John Berlau talks about what's going to happen when debit card price controls go into effect on Saturday.

Listen here.

CEI - EPA/NHTSA announcement on fuel economy stickers

Today, the U.S. EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) unveiled their new, improved "next generation" fuel economy sticker, which all model year 2013 vehicles will be required to display.  The agencies hype the news lables as the most dramatic overhaul to fuel economy labels since the program began more than 30 years ago," promising to provide car buyers with "more comprehensive fuel efficiency information, including estimated annual fuel costs, savings, as well as information on each vehicle's environmental impact." 

CEI's Marlo Lewis explains the thinking behind the agencies' redesign of the fuel economy label. The agencies imagine that mandating more information via stickers will finally cause consumers to forego SUVs and other vehicles disfavored by environmentalists and government agencies.  In a clumsy attempt at behavioral manipulation, the agencies originally planned to assign letter grades to vehicles, based on fuel efficiency, with the "best" vehicles earning an "A" grade and the "worst" vehicles earing a "D" grade.  But that plan was scrapped when the House intervened; hence, the stickers unveiled today.

"Years of SUV-bashing, fuel-economy prosyletizing, climate-change scaremongering, and high gasoline prices have failed to kill SUV sales," Marlo Lewis writes on Globalwarming.org today. "Could that have something to do with the attributes of the vehicles - their size, safety, and utility? Are there no physical differences between SUVs and cars greenies insist are 'smart'?"

  > Read the full blog post on Globalwarming.org: Next Generation Fuel Economy Sticker - To Boldly Label What No Agency Has Labeled Before

WFI - The Hill: Labor, Republicans battle over organizing in transportation sector

The Hill

Keith Laing and Kevin Bogardus

5.20.11

http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/162313-labor-and-gop-battle-over-organizing-in-transportation-sector

The inroads that labor unions have made in the transportation sector this year are being met with fervent resistance from Republicans. 

Even as state-level fights over labor rights have raged in places like Wisconsin and Ohio, Capitol Hill has been consumed with the actions of federal agencies like the National Mediation Board (NMB) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) that have helped unions expand their ranks in the travel industry.

One battle over union rights for airline and railroad employees has helped stall the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) reauthorization bill. The gridlock is forcing the House next week to take up another stopgap measure — the 19th in a row — to fund the FAA.

House Republicans inserted a provision in the FAA reauthorization bill to repeal the NMB’s new rules that would ease union organizing. The White House threatened to veto the legislation unless that provision was removed.

The board’s new union organizing rules continue to attract GOP attention. Some Republicans have even suggested defunding the NMB if it does not repeal the new labor standards. 

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said this week that he was going to look into the rules that were changed last year to ensure that non-voters were not counted as votes against forming a union for workers covered by the Railway Labor Act.

In a letter to NMB Chairman Harry Hoglander, Issa said he wants to take a look at whether the board was trying to “advance a partisan policy agenda.”

“We are concerned by the National Mediation Board’s decision to advance a rule which allows a minority of employees to determine union representation,” wrote Issa and Rep. Dennis Ross (R-Fla.), who heads up the House Subcommittee on Labor Policy. 

“For over 75 years, the board conducted union representation elections according to the principle that a union would be certified as the collective bargaining representative only if a majority of the eligible employees in the relevant craft or class voted in favor of union representation,” the letter said.

Supporters of the NMB’s action argue that union elections should be conducted like elections for political office, where those who show up to vote determine a majority. 

Meanwhile, labor is set to score a big victory Monday on organizing at the TSA despite GOP moves to block it.

On Monday the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) will face off in a runoff election to be the exclusive union of the TSA. The voting is expected to last nearly a month.

The TSA decided to grant the agency’s 40,000 transportation security officers collective bargaining rights earlier this year over strong GOP opposition.

“Obviously, it was a very long, hard-fought fight for these employees to earn collective bargaining rights,” said Colleen Kelley, NTEU’s national president. “In these times when there has been so many attacks on collective bargaining rights, it was a huge win not only for the employees but for the agency, since this will help them be more effective at doing their jobs.”

AFGE and NTEU officials told The Hill that they expected their union membership to spike if they win the runoff election. That expansion of union ranks would not have come to pass if GOP lawmakers had been successful in their efforts to block it.

After TSA Administrator John Pistole granted agency workers collective bargaining rights in February, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) sponsored an amendment to the FAA bill that would have stripped them of those rights. That failed to pass on a narrow party-line vote.

Before that, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) held up the nomination of Erroll Southers as TSA administrator after he repeatedly asked the nominee about his plans to unionize the agency. Now, DeMint says, there isn’t much he can do to stop the TSA union election.

“There is not a lot we can do now except stamp our feet, because the employer here is the federal government. They are the ones that are pushing the unionization,” DeMint told reporters Thursday on a conference call sponsored by the right-leaning Workforce Fairness Institute. “I don’t know what we can do, because I have tried to make this an important issue, but it has been very difficult to get the media to even cover it.”

But DeMint has not given up on another union-related effort to block a complaint by the National Labor Relations Board against Boeing for allegedly retaliating against union workers. The company planned to set up a second production line for its 787 Dreamliner jet in South Carolina — a right-to-work state that tends to ban mandatory union membership — due to worries over possible work stoppages in its unionized plants in Washington state.

That led to the labor board filing a complaint against Boeing, which DeMint called “anti-American and anti-democratic.”

The senator has signed on to legislation introduced by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) last week that would protect states’ right-to-work laws. DeMint said he also plans to keep pushing the issue into the spotlight to force the labor board’s general counsel, Lafe Solomon, to back off the complaint. 

The next step for the complaint is a June 14 hearing before an administrative law judge in Seattle.

Christopher Corson, general counsel of the International Association of Machinists, said the recent transportation fights over labor are the product of Republicans using whatever mechanisms they can to try to thwart them.

“They are just looking for issues that they can turn into an overall attack,” Corson said.

The Machinists first raised charges of Boeing retaliating against union workers with the labor board. Corson said the labor board’s subsequent complaint has been twisted into an attack on states’ right-to-work laws. 

“What the board is doing is a law enforcement action here. A law enforcement action should not be hijacked by a politician for their agenda,” Corson said. 

DeMint sees it differently, saying that labor is in decline and that the Obama administration is coming to the rescue. 

“The only way to save unions is to have the government step in and force workers to join unions,” DeMint said. “We have got a shameless and cynical promotion of unions going on here.”