Is Congress about to limit freedom of speech on the Internet? Two bills wending their way through the Senate and the House may do just that. The proposals, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are aimed at stopping foreign-based Web sites from distributing copyrighted material, such as Hollywood movies, in violation of U.S. law. Such online “piracy” is a real problem, and since many of the so-called pirate sites distributing content are based off-shore, they have been able to operate without interference. …
Hindsight is supposed to be 20/20, but looking back on the past 12 months, it’s tough to see any sense in many of the Administration’s regulatory missteps. Of course, there are bound to be a few howlers when government churns out more than 3,500 rules in a year, including dozens unleashed by Obamacare, Dodd–Frank, and the perpetually errant Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). But by any standard, 2011 brought forth a remarkable number and variety of regulatory blunders. Fair warning: Our Top 10 list may prove fatal to any bit of …
Yesterday, after word got out (via a post here on the Foundry) regarding new “mandatory fees” on Christmas trees imposed by the Obama Department of Agriculture (USDA), the White House moved quickly to suspend implementation of the new tax. The fees, which were supported by an industry group called the Christmas Tree Check-off Task Force, were earmarked for industry marketing efforts. USDA’s role was to make sure that all growers helped pay for those efforts, whether they supported them or not. Those growers, at least for now, have been given …
With nine days to go before the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) faces default, a Senate committee on Wednesday is expected to vote on a new plan to address the crisis. The plan takes a few steps in the right direction, but it falls short of the comprehensive reform that is needed. The immediate problem for USPS is a $5.5 billion payment to the federal treasury to fund retiree health benefits that is due on November 18, and it doesn’t have the money to pay. But USPS’s problem is much deeper …
The newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) took a step forward today to getting its first director, as the Senate Banking Committee voted 12–10 to confirm Richard Cordray in the post. Even before the vote, however, President Obama raised the stakes. Referring to Bank of America’s decision to impose a $5 debit card fees, he declared that “this is exactly why we need somebody whose sole job it is to prevent this kind of stuff from happening.” The White House later tried to back off the President’s threat of …
What’s wrong with this picture? Last night, President Obama told Congress that the nation desperately needs to spend more on infrastructure in order to create jobs and to get the economy moving again. But only last month, his regulators aggressively moved to thwart private-sector plans to invest tens of billions on new infrastructure and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs. The issue is AT&T and its plan to acquire T-Mobile (now a subsidiary of the German telephone company Deutsche Telekom). The wireless industry has been one the most dazzling …
Will the last one to leave the post office please turn out the lights? Things are looking pretty grim at the Postal Service. In a report made public today, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) proposed cutting 220,000 positions, leaving its workforce—which once ranked with Indian Railways and the People’s Liberation Army as among the world’s largest—at 425,000. Some 120,000 of these cutbacks would be through layoffs, which are barred under current union contracts. The reason for the cutbacks is clear: The Postal Service is running out of money. According to …
“When all else fails, blame Bush.” This seems to be the operating principle of the current Administration. Case in point: At a conference on innovation earlier this week, Cass Sunstein—the head of OMB’s regulatory review office—tried to deflect criticism that the Obama Administration was responsible for a “tsunami” of regulation sweeping over the American economy. His defense: Bush was worse: “The annual cost of regulations has not increased during the Obama administration,” Sunstein said. “In its last two years, executive agencies in the Bush administration proposed far higher regulatory costs …
Four months after President Obama called for a government-wide initiative to identify outdated regulations that are stifling the American economy, the first results are in. As announced today by Obama “regulatory czar” Cass Sunstein, agencies have identified a wide-ranging set of regulations to roll back, promising some welcome savings for consumers and the economy. Among the steps highlighted today by Sunstein: Eliminating an EPA requirement that gas stations maintain gas vapor recovery systems, a requirement that is redundant with air pollution controls required on cars today. Estimated savings: $67 million. …
