Politico reports on the Eco Warrior president’s latest gift to the nation: The most expensive regulation in history.
The Obama administration proposed a draft air pollution rule on Wednesday that business groups charge could be the costliest regulation of all time — setting up a test of how hard the president will fight for his environmental agenda against a newly strengthened GOP.
President Barack Obama has already blinked once on the rule, which aims to limit smog-creating ozone pollution after 2020 from power plants and factories: Just before Labor Day in 2011, he forced the Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw an almost-final version of the rule, infuriating green groups that accused him of capitulating to industry pressure to ease his reelection. Obama said he was acting to “underscore the importance of reducing regulatory burdens and regulatory uncertainty.”
This is easy to explain. He blinked in 2011 because he faced re-election in 2012. How dare the voters get the chance to hold him accountable for unleashing the bureaucracy!
Now he is punishing America for electing Republicans to Congress — in his mind — but he’s actually punishing American for electing him president.
[B]usiness groups are just as adamant that a tough new limit on ozone would devastate the economy by making it difficult to open or expand hundreds of manufacturing plants in much of the country. “This would be the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the American public,” said the National Association of Manufacturers, in a July study calculating that an especially strict version of the rule would wipe out $3.4 trillion in economic output and 2.9 million jobs by 2040.
On Wednesday, the association said EPA’s proposal jeopardizes the nation’s manufacturing comeback and indeed “threatens to be the most expensive ever.” The ozone draft “comes at the same time dozens of other new EPA regulations are being imposed that collectively place increased costs, burdens and delays on manufacturers, threaten our international competitiveness and make it nearly impossible to grow jobs,” the group said.
Predictably, greens say the regulation doesn’t go far enough. While the leaders of the big green political machine fly around from conference to conference in their jets, they would have the rest of us living in caves.
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