Tag Archives: regulation

And This from the Fourth Branch of the Federal Government

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Victoria McGrane and Jon Hilsenrath write in The Wall Street Journal:

The Federal Reserve has operated almost entirely behind closed doors as it rewrites the rule book governing the U.S. financial system….

Hmm….

Since the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul became law in July 2010, the Fed has held 47 separate votes on financial regulations, and scores more are coming. In the process it is reshaping the U.S. financial industry by directing banks on…what kind of trading they can engage in and what kind of fees they can charge retailers on debit-card transactions.

It’s hard to have such arrogance when the public is listening in.

But some would disagree with the secretiveness.  Sheila Bair, ex-Chairwoman of the FDIC, suggests

People have a right to know and hear the discussion and hear the presentations and the reasoning for these rules.  All of the other agencies which are governed by boards or commissions propose and approve these rules in public meetings.  I think it would be in the Fed’s interest to do so as well.

Naturally, the Fed insists that there’s nothing wrong with the secrecy.  Fed Governor Daniel Tarullo says with a straight face that open meetings aren’t always the most effective means to increasing public understanding, and they aren’t a gauge of regulators’ work.

You can have a scripted meeting that does not show any engagement at all….

But this is just a red herring.  Scripting is a hazard of all public meetings, not only the Fed’s.  But more to the real point, this argument elides the fact that there’s no increase in public understanding, either, from secret meetings, nor do such closed-door meetings provide any gauge at all of regulators’ work.

Open meetings could also strain the already busy schedules of top Fed officials. The Fed currently has 250 separate rule-writing projects under way.

There’s a hint there, and it has to do with all those regulations and regulation-writing exercises.

For whom do these guys think they work?

Another Unintended Consequence

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And this one is entirely predictable, so we have no excuse for it occurring.

The Obama administration has closed the comment period on a new set of automobile fuel efficiency standards, taking the government-mandated average from the current 2016 requirement of 35.5 mpg to 54.5 mpg by 2025—a 53% increase in those 9 years.  Superficially, this seems good for the environment and good for the amount of oil we buy from the Middle East.

However.

These fuel efficiency standards will add $3,200 to the price of a new car.  As a result, the National Automobile Dealers Association estimates that nearly 7 million drivers won’t be able to buy them because they’ll be unable to qualify for the loans necessary.  After all, most car buyers do so with loans against the car or pickup that they’re buying.  As the NADA points out, during the loan approval process,

…it matters not whether the new vehicles in question offer improved fuel economy performance characteristics compared to the transportation options currently being used by prospective purchasers. … All that matters is whether prospective purchasers are creditworthy.

As a result, cash-strapped—and other frugal—buyers will simple keep their existing cars longer or buy off the used car lot, thus keeping the (relative) gas guzzlers on the road longer.  Any claimed savings from the greater fuel efficiency is just “fantasy” for these 7 million drivers.

Moreover, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers estimates that compliance costs will reach $133 billion to $157 billion by the end of the process.  This is separate from the loss of sales of some $175 billion from those drivers not buying the new “fuel-efficient” car at a naively estimated $25,000 per.

Contraception Regulation

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Others have some thoughts on this, along with matters carefully ignoredmissed by President Obama.

Ruth Ann Daily of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette points out a principle that was well understood in our early days, but that our former University of Chicago Senior Lecturer in Constitutional Law seems to have…forgotten.

She describes an 1801 exchange of letters between Thomas Jefferson and a coalition of Baptist ministers from Connecticut, where the Congregationalist Church was supported by all citizens’ state taxes [emphasis added].

The “Danbury Baptists” and other minorities…could seek an exemption certificate that would route their taxes to their own church, but in practice, many municipalities made that difficult to do, and in principle, the Baptists argued, it was wrong:

“What religious privileges we enjoy (as a minor part of the State) we enjoy as favors granted, and not as inalienable rights,” they wrote to Jefferson, “and these favors we receive at the expense of such degrading acknowledgements, as are inconsistent with the rights of freemen.”

Jefferson’s response extolled the “wall of separation between church and state,” a metaphor borrowed from Rhode Island founder Roger Williams. The Baptists and the deist skeptic are still right, 210 years later: An exemption, by definition, establishes one worldview over another and relegates dissenters to second-class status. Therefore the government must abstain from any such sphere where its presence is not absolutely necessary — as in forcing employers or insurance companies to dispense free contraceptives.

Caroline May of The Daily Caller describes another aspect of this problem that Obama…missed: some insurance providers are “religious organizations whose beliefs preclude them from offering birth control.”

She quotes Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission:

Let’s just take Southern Baptists, there are 16 million of us, almost all of us are covered by a self-funded insurance program called GuideStone.  So when he says “well you don’t have to pay for it, your insurance company will,” our insurance company is a Southern Baptist insurance company, it is self-funded through the denomination, so it is totally unconscionable for them to provide abortifacients.

As Land put it

My initial reaction is: How dumb does he think we are?  Does he think when he puts lip stick on a pig, that we don’t understand that it is still a pig?

Hmm….