Over-Regulated America, Indeed

Posted by Chamber Grassroots on February 22nd at 10:37am



Last week’s cover story of British news publication, The Economist,  highlighted the absurdities of America’s exploding regulatory state.  The article points out that while some regulations are so senseless it’s comical, their economic harm is no laughing matter. : 

Consider the Dodd-Frank law of 2010. Its aim was noble: to prevent another financial crisis ... But Dodd-Frank is far too complex and becoming more so. At 848 pages, it is 23 times longer than Glass-Steagall, the reform that followed the Wall Street crash of 1929. Worse, every other page demands that regulators fill in further detail. Some of these clarifications are hundreds of pages long. Just one bit, the “Volcker rule”, which aims to curb risky proprietary trading by banks, includes 383 questions that break down into 1,420 subquestions.

Hardly anyone has actually read Dodd-Frank, besides the Chinese government and our correspondent in New York (see article). Those who have struggle to make sense of it, not least because so much detail has yet to be filled in: of the 400 rules it mandates, only 93 have been finalised. So financial firms in America must prepare to comply with a law that is partly unintelligible and partly unknowable.

Even absent the myriad of hoops businesses are forced to jump through, the uncertainty created by regulatory monstrosities like Dodd-Frank make it exceedingly hard for business to grow when they don’t know what the ground rules will be.

The U.S. Chamber has been a leading voice in the effort to fight back against out-of-control regulation in America that harms businesses and makes it more expensive and difficult to grow and hire. We’re advocating for legislation that seeks to reign  rein in overzealous regulations and the agencies that create them, as well as implement parameters to take into account the economic impact of regulation moving forward.  

Click here to take action, and ask Congress to prevent future harmful regulations like these by supporting the Regulatory Accountability Act.

 


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