By Douglas Holtz-Eakin
The young drop coverage to avoid higher premiums
In the past several weeks, organizations such as the National Association of Colored Persons (NAACP) and the Hispanic Federation have publicly stated their opposition to the ban on large sodas initiated by New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg last year, and shut down by New York State Judge Milton A. Tingling this week. While they cite the impact of the ban on minority-owned businesses and the myriad factors that influence health and obesity, these groups also make a more fundamental point about freedom of choice. Everyone should be able to choose what he or she drinks without being “nudged” away from larger drinks by their city government.
President Obama's drive for dramatic reforms in American politics and policy is a near copycat of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1944 push for a Second Bill of Rights, according to one legal scholar, Cass Sunstein.
A former Obama administration official has a book coming about how government might work in the future.
When the president issues an executive order, Cabinet-level departments get in line with administration policy. Though independent regulatory commissions (technically not part of the administration) are not required to follow executive orders, they usually try.
You have to know that times are desperate in the Obama campaign when Sen. Harry Reid is trotted out to contend that Mitt Romney didn't pay taxes for a decade.
Regulation is playing a starring role in keeping the economy in neutral. Recognizing this, President Obama has recently been making some baby steps in the direction of regulatory sanity.
The White House is pushing the idea that President Obama is a business-friendly regulation cutter. That's about as likely as the works of Ayn Rand showing up in the first lady's book-club reading list.
As policy discussions in Wash- ington become more and more entrenched, hardworking Ameri- cans across the country are calling for change as they continue to shoul- der the burden of impractical policies.
Cass Sunstein, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), recently outlined how he and others in the White House Office of Management and Budget were eliminating bureaucratic red tape in the executive branch agencies. In fact, while the rollout of the White House's widely touted regulatory reform initiative may have started with a bang, it has followed with a whimper. In contrast to the fanfare surrounding issuance of Executive Order 13563, or his May 26 announcement of the preliminary results of a government-wide review of the current morass of federal regulations, Mr. Sunstein's Aug. 23 release of final agency plans to scale back regulations was, for the most part, a non-event.
President Obama ordered the Environmental Protection Agency Friday to shelve proposed regulations for new air-quality standards, citing the potential impact on the weak economy.
Will President Obama's governmentwide review of existing regulations have a positive net impact on the psyche and bottom lines of small-business owners? The short answer is no. The burden of the existing system, made worse by the torrent of new regulations, has become far too costly and intrusive.
The White House said Tuesday that it's going to revise some 500 regulations it said have unnecessarily tied the private sector's hands, but the announcement drew little enthusiasm from a business community that said it will do little to overcome a slew of new health care and financial regulations already passed under President Obama.
It is widely recognized that excessive regulation is unnecessarily killing jobs. The question has been what to do about it. President Obama may inadvertently have helped lead to a solution in his debate last week with an Iowa farmer who was complaining about excessive costly regulation. In his reply to the farmer, Mr. Obama said: "[A] lot of times we are going to be applying common sense. If someone has an idea, if we don't think it's a good idea, if we don't think there is more benefit than cost to it, we are not going to do it." Nice statement, but it is untrue in all too many cases, whether the president knows it or not.
Businesses big and small aren't buying President Obama's claim that he's reducing the burden of costly federal regulations, a major barrier to job growth.
From the founding of the American republic, members of the political class have been caught lying about sex and, no doubt, sex scandals will continue, men (and women) being who they are. There often are demands that those involved resign - and sometimes they do because they are shamed or pushed. Most often, the real damage caused by lies about sex extend no further than to those directly involved, to their families and, at times, to their co-workers and colleagues.
"Obama's second inaugural did not refer explicitly to the Second Bill of Rights," he said, in the Bloomberg report, "but it had an unmistakably Rooseveltian flavor.
FDR announced a Second Bill of Rights in his 1944 State of the Union speech, claiming "we have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence," Mr. Sunstein said, in a Bloomberg report.
