Listening to President Obama’s speech last week about even more climate change legislation, I was reminded of Yogi Berra’s classic remark: “It’s déjà vu all over again.” Who else but this president could conclude that even more EPA regulations would not harm economic growth? Instead of working with Congress to find bipartisan compromise on key issues, the president prefers to shove yet another large government, Washington-centric agenda down our throats. Worse yet, the policies he is implementing in the form of burdensome fresh regulations will do more harm than good to the average American.
There is increasing ideological stubbornness on both sides of Washington, but Obama has made the situation worse, not better. He and his staff openly say he does not believe it is part of his responsibility to work with Congress to implement his proposals. Rather, his solution was to simply bypass Congress and expand ever-thickening layers of bureaucracy into his increasingly dysfunctional government.
His climate change plan is the latest in a series of above-and-beyond executive actions. Past power grabs have included the excessive and expanded operate of “break meetings” throughout his bureaucracy, his well-intentioned but ineffective fresh gun laws, and the operate of fresh powers under Obamacare to force religious organizations to offer abortion services under their health insurance plans . In this case, the Clean Air Act was passed four decades ago to control emissions, not to dictate what energy sources the country could operate, which is the purpose of Obama’s latest proposal. It seeks nothing less than to eliminate coal as an energy source in America.
Worse still, bureaucrats in Washington are unable to keep pace with actually implementing the mountain of fresh regulations that Obama-backed initiatives have imposed on our economy. Every day brings fresh reports about problems and delays in the implementation of Obamacare. One cannot hope that the bill will collapse under its own weight, given how poorly many of its provisions are written. Dozens of fresh regulations required by Dodd-Frank have yet to be proposed, let alone implemented. And what are we to make of the IRS bureaucracy where, we are told, “low-level” employees themselves have devised a plan to selectively audit the tax returns of this administration’s political enemies. By the way, the IRS is responsible for implementing most of Obamacare.
Let’s be clear: these additional carbon regulations will raise energy costs for every American family. Obama’s ‘war on coal’ will cost thousands of jobs in states with middle incomes below the national median. Maybe the President doesn’t care because most of these states didn’t support him anyway. Could this approach really mean the course of the IRS scandal? Economic growth, which has remained at a dismal 2% throughout the Obama administration, is certain to suffer another shock. Our persistently high levels of unemployment, which are devastating economic opportunities for an entire generation of Americans, can be directly attributed to our over-taxed and over-regulated economy.
The president would do well to look to states as examples of what can be achieved by reducing regulations to create an environment more conducive to job creation and economic growth. States with Republican governors and legislative majorities, such as Ohio, Florida, Iowa and Michigan, have seen reduced unemployment and improved economic performance since 2010. These states have also maintained their stance on spending and tax cuts, policies that are the opposite of those ruthlessly pursued by Obama’s Washington. Other states that continue to promote business-friendly policies include Texas, Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Republican Virginia consistently outperforms Democratic Maryland. Virtually every state that gains population and jobs are states that focus on improving government operations and creating private sector jobs, rather than government-led spending.
Instead of continually adding to the bureaucracy in Washington, the President must work with Congress to create policies that facilitate the private sector create private economy jobs across the country, not government jobs in Washington.
