It’s important to be smart with federal regulations

GOVERNMENT regulations are needed to protect public health and safety; they also can make sure there is a level playing field for the free market. But regulations serve little purpose when they are unnecessary, encourage crony capitalism or are so inefficient that they cause more harm than good.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute reports that the regulatory state imposes $1.9 trillion in annual costs on the economy. Are all of these costs necessary and efficient? No.

In fact, if the regulatory state were an economy, it would be larger than Canada’s entire GDP, the eighth largest in the world. It costs more than the U.S. government collects from income taxes. And it’s almost equal to all of the corporate pretax profits earned in 2016.

Democrats tend to see the regulatory state as beneficial because it has served at times to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority. Republicans tend to see the regulatory state as a noose around the neck of capitalism, which produces the benefits Americans enjoy.

President Donald Trump took office with a promise to severely cut back the federal government; he has followed through by ordering federal bureaucracies to cut two rules for every new one.

Whether Trump’s cutbacks have all been wise is open to debate. But there is no question his administration has put a damper on new federal rules.

According to a Politico analysis, the White House approved just 156 regulations since Inauguration Day, a huge drop compared with the administrations of former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. During Bush’s first year, 445 new regulations were approved; there were 510 new rules approved during Year One of Obama’s presidency.

There is more interest in streamlining permitting for bridge, pipeline, transportation, telecommunications and other infrastructure projects. That sounds reasonable: There is no reason to run every project, regardless of size, through a relentless gauntlet of approvals.

Wayne Crews, vice president for policy at CEI, says that during Trump’s first six months in office, federal agencies released 99 “significant rules” vs. 173 for Obama’s first six months. A significant rule has an annual economic impact of $100 million or more.

The administration’s most controversial regulatory rollbacks involve environmental rules, especially turning back mileage targets for vehicles imposed by the Obama administration.

It’s important that health effects are included when assessing the impact of environmental rules. Yet history shows that automakers have been more than capable of adjusting to health and safety mandates when they are given reasonable time to make changes.

Rolling back regulations for the coal industry has been called a “coal subsidy.” But you have to question the real benefit of these rollbacks given the coal mining industry’s ever-decreasing footprint in America — it now employs merely 53,000 Americans.

The Trump administration would be better served to launch programs to retrain coal workers for jobs in the booming solar electric industry.