Friday, June 17, 2016

Cleaning Up Environmental Regulation

by Diane Katz 

Environmental regulations constitute a hefty portion of America’s regulatory burden, in large part because “reform” is an alien concept within the Environmental Protection Agency. But the House GOP on Tuesday unveiled a new policy agenda that, with any luck (and political fortitude), will reverse decades of regulatory excess and abuse.

In many respects, the need for reform of regulation has never been greater. In the past seven years, the Obama administration has increased annual regulatory costs by $108 billion annually. Decades of command and control regimes have produced massive, ineffective, and unaccountable bureaucracies. And the nation’s primary environmental statutes are woefully outdated.

Now comes “A Better Way,” a series of reform proposals from a task force of House Republicans that incorporates many of the regulatory lessons of the past four decades.

As noted in the chapter on regulatory reform, “What federal agencies need more than anything else is some humility. At the very least, new and existing federal regulations can be modernized to inflict far less economic pain.”

Regulatory costs are a problem, to be sure. But the regulatory onslaught of recent years has also exacted an incalculable toll on individual liberty. So pervasive has regulation become that the fundamental character of the nation now resembles servitude to a vast administrative state.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The American dream of being able to own your own land, build a home, make improvements is almost over,recently taken away by bureaucrats decree.
Our elected Senators and Congressman have been either powerless, worthless, spineless, or out numbered to stop it, they have sold us out. But that is how they have been on every issue form protecting our borders from invasion, illegal immigration, war on drugs, war on terrorism, to long a list to print here.....

Check out the new rules published and enforced with the power of law in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR).
https://www.federalregister.gov/select-citation/2016/06/01/33-CFR-323.4
http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/cfr/subject-title-33.html
Beyond their original mandate of "navigable waters", to predominately dry lands on the Continental Divide (without Constitutional authority) EPA/ACE now have control of you, and what you do on your property, and maintaining the road to it. Any activity where water may run from rain is under their authority. Dry creeks/empheral streams, washes, ditches, you name it.

From the article: "The task force recommends that the standards undergo review every 10 years instead"..... The havoc and horror that a property owner's family can be put through in those 10 years ruins families financially and tears them apart forever, dis-repairable. But in reality that is what they want, to degrowth the country.

The only answers are:
1. Dismantle the EPA.
2. Put the Army Corp Engineers back where they historically can do good: on navigable waters and territorial waters.
3. End the ESA.
4. End the WOTUS rule.
5. Wipe the CFR's clean of environmental rules and start over with direct legislation by our elected Representatives.