Latest Stupidity from MSM - Regulation Is, Like, Totally Harmless for the Economy
In a classic of the "Who You Gonna Believe, Me or Your Own Lyin' Eyes?" variety, Bloomberg News - deep into its support campaign for the re-election of Barack Obama - tries to get us to believe that the explosion of regulations coming out of Washington isn't hurting the economy, and they have something snazzily called the BGOV Barometer to convince you of this. (I'm sure the BGOV Barometer would also tell you that falling out of a fourth story window wouldn't hurt either.)
Of course the definitional criteria is narrow and misses the point - employers responsible for dismissals of at least 50 employees cited regulations in just 1% of the cases. This is of course measuring large employers - companies that can lay off 50 or more people and still have people working there. Among small business owners, regulation is their number one concern. That's strike one. Strike two is that regulations are working their way into the system now, they wouldn't account for previous lay-offs. Bank of America is in the process of laying off 30,000 workers, and here is a list of more. UBS will lay off thousands. Does anybody really think that Dodd-Frank, Washington's silver medal olympian regulatory feat, has nothing to do with this? It strains logic to deny the link. Moving on, government regulations wield their most devastating effect not on existing jobs but on hiring, and we all know there has been very little hiring. So who cares if regulations don't directly link to layoffs? They do directly link to lack of hiring, which is stagnation. So regulation is Okey-Dokey because it gives mere stagnation rather than contraction? Dumb. Strike three.
Bloomberg is measuring the wrong thing, over the wrong time period and making the wrong conclusion. Regulation is they number one key to economic reinvigoration, and the next occupant of the White House, be it President Obama or Romney or Cain or Perry, will succeed or fail based on whether they can tame the onslaught of regulation plaguing the economy.
Of course the definitional criteria is narrow and misses the point - employers responsible for dismissals of at least 50 employees cited regulations in just 1% of the cases. This is of course measuring large employers - companies that can lay off 50 or more people and still have people working there. Among small business owners, regulation is their number one concern. That's strike one. Strike two is that regulations are working their way into the system now, they wouldn't account for previous lay-offs. Bank of America is in the process of laying off 30,000 workers, and here is a list of more. UBS will lay off thousands. Does anybody really think that Dodd-Frank, Washington's silver medal olympian regulatory feat, has nothing to do with this? It strains logic to deny the link. Moving on, government regulations wield their most devastating effect not on existing jobs but on hiring, and we all know there has been very little hiring. So who cares if regulations don't directly link to layoffs? They do directly link to lack of hiring, which is stagnation. So regulation is Okey-Dokey because it gives mere stagnation rather than contraction? Dumb. Strike three.
Bloomberg is measuring the wrong thing, over the wrong time period and making the wrong conclusion. Regulation is they number one key to economic reinvigoration, and the next occupant of the White House, be it President Obama or Romney or Cain or Perry, will succeed or fail based on whether they can tame the onslaught of regulation plaguing the economy.
posted by Donny Baseball at 12:20 PM
1 Comments:
Have they ever heard of the Licence Raj system? Why is India suddenly growing after they got rid of onerous regulations? Hmmmm.
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