WSJ on Obama's economic obfuscations

The worst part about the president's economic obfuscations, as the Wall Street Journal points out at the end of a paid-registration required op-ed is that Obama doesn't figure in future regulations, such as the massively burdensome Dodd-Frank financial bill and ObamaCare.

Among the core assumptions of modern liberalism is that future regulations have no more effect on the economy than future taxes, as if expectations don't matter and businesses don't prepare now for their costs tomorrow. President Obama's letter to John Boehner yesterday is a classic of the genre.

Last week the Speaker asked the White House to disclose any federal rules in the works with economic costs of $1 billion or more. Proposed or final rule-makings are defined as "major" when their estimated annual costs exceed $100 million. The Obama regulatory agenda for 2011 contains 219 such items. Last year, that figure was 191, versus the combined total for the first two years of the Bush Administration of 103. Amid this surge, Mr. Boehner's underlying point was that the regulatory ambitions of the Obamanauts are redefining "major," much in the way trillion is the new billion for government spending.

Mr. Obama responded by identifying seven pending major rules topping $1 billion, like the Department of Transportation's federal motor vehicle safety standard No. 111 for rearview mirrors ($3 billion) and the Environmental Protection Agency's ozone regulations (as much as $90 billion). But even that understates the costs, as Mr. Obama explains at length. The regulatory agenda is "merely a list of rules that are under general contemplation" and "merely proposed" and "includes a large number of rules that are in a highly preliminary state, with no reliable cost estimate."

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