-By Warner Todd Huston
There is a lot of talk about the high cost of regulations (in fact, a lot of talk from me about them). But how do you put a number on that cost? Well Sam Batkins of the American Action Forum has been keeping a running tab not only on the high cost of the regulations themselves but also the man hours it takes Americans to implement them and the cost is staggering.
Every Friday Batkins reviews that week’s new regulatory onslaught, makes his calculations and thus far Obama’s regulatory juggernaut is costing Americans $84.8 billion bucks. But that isn’t the last of what it will cost Americans. In order to implement these regulations, to make sure business and individuals are following the rules, it will cost Americans 88.2 million annual man hours to do the paperwork, file the reports, and follow the Internet-based reporting procedures in order to satisfy the rules.
Imagine this burden of worker’s time wasted just to make sure we follow regulations! It is obscene.
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Obama’s Regulations So Far Cost Us $84.8 Billion And Climbing Weekly”
When does a columnist write something so utterly absurd that his credibility is forever damaged? I am not sure how to answer that in general terms, but I think at least one journalist answered the question for his own, now thoroughly destroyed veracity. Jonathan Alter of Bloomberg has written one of the most ridiculous, least reality-based assessments yet of the short White House tenure of Barack Obama.
On Friday I attended an informative business roundtable meeting of Chicago-area small businessmen who came together to discuss how government intervention and its avalanche of regulations are killing jobs and businesses not only in Illinois, but nation wide. Some of the stories were chilling, to say the least. These trials go to show how anti-business the most famously capitalist country in the world has become. No wonder we can’t get out of this second great depression!
The event was held at the headquarters of The Rabine Group in Schaumburg, Illinois. The Rabine Group is a group of nationwide companies that specializes in driveway paving, roofing, and other contracting work. The company is headed by owner and CEO Gary Rabine.
Governor Scott Walker was the worst devil the unions could imagine. They targeted him and Wisconsin’s Republicans mercilessly earlier this year. Fortunately, the unions and their Democrat handmaidens lost most of these battles.
In another breach of trust between President Obama and the American people, Obama has once again broken a promise to change the business-as-usual habits of Washington. As a candidate and early in his presidency Obama claimed he’d bring an unprecedented transparency to Washington. But now it looks as though he’s OKayed his agencies to lie about the records they hold.
Like the rest of the large cities in the US, Chicago is currently suffering with small pockets of Occupy protesters and their ever-present signs. And like every other big city these signs are often misspelled, sometimes profane, commonly anti-capitalist, occasionally anti-Semitic, almost always anti-American, not to mention merely ignorant of the facts. But one thing that is the same in every protest, at least in the media reportage of same, is that the worst of the signs go unseen by the general American news consumer.
The left-wing media’s newest attack on Rick Perry is an attempt to make him into a “birther” — one of those folks that think Barack Obama is not a natural born American, a requirement to become our president. This new attack, though, is almost Clintonian in its careful avoidance of the truth.
A Southern Illinois newspaper 
A recent New York Times 
Did Obama’s medical record czar, Judy Faulkner, hoodwink five members of Congress into pushing her own medical records company as the solution for the problem of electronic medical records for all government contracts? That’s what some wonder as Obama’s search for an electronic medical records solution evolves.