Deregulation has dramatically improved American competitiveness. Let's have more.
"Although President Ronald Reagan succeeded in reversing the growing federal regulatory burden for a time, regulatory growth accelerated under President George Bush and, by all accounts, has exploded under President Bill Clinton," reports Angela Antonelli of the Heritage Foundation. "Initially, the Republican-led 104th Congress . . . slowed the rate of growth in new regulations," Antonelli continues. "Unfortunately, those efforts were short-lived. Today, the size, scope, and cost of the federal regulatory system are increasing at record rates."
Antonelli charges that federal agencies established "to protect the public and save lives . . . increasingly impose ineffective, costly regulations on individuals and businesses that do little to improve public health and safety." Just how expensive is this mindless meddling? "The total cost to the economy of all regulation in 1998 has been estimated to be $700 billion. This," she points out, "is a hidden tax of more than $6,800 per American family."
Antonelli perceives "little to no remaining justification for federal involvement in many sectors of the U.S. economy, such as electricity, natural gas, communications, transportation, agriculture, and much of banking." Noting that Congress has made "substantial progress in reforming economic regulation, particularly in deregulating specific industries," she urges federal legislators to pursue this process to its logical conclusion: complete dismantlement of obsolete agencies and departments. Alas, Antonelli has detected "a dramatic shift in the sources of increased regulatory spending." She laments that "the steady rise in social regulations -- including environment, health, and safety standards, as well as other governmentimposed rights and benefits -- continues unabated."
Mandated racial preferences are among the many social regulations that cry out for termination. Adam Meyerson, Michael Franc, and Todd Gaziano of the Heritage Foundation contend that racial preferences are not only wrong; they're also counterproductive. "Racial preferences have failed to increase opportunities for poor and working-class Americans," they say. "Thirty years after racial preferences became a central element in public policy, more black men are in prison than in college; almost three-fourths of black children are born out of wedlock; barely half of black 12th graders can pass a basic reading test; and many inner cities with large black populations have become wastelands of violence, drugs, self-destruction, and despair. More than a quarter of black families and almost half of black children live in poverty, mostly as a result of the collapse of marriage," say the three analysts. "Racial preferences clearly have not been an effective solution to these problems."
Meyerson, et al. recommend legislation that would "end the federal government's practice of imposing race-based and sex-based preferences on more than $160 billion in federal contracts annually; establish race-neutral and sex-neutral principles in the hiring, promotion, and evaluation of all federal employees; end the imposition of federal racial quotas on privatesector firms doing business with the government; and end discriminatory practices in the operation of hundreds of federal programs." They also advocate eliminating "race-conscious admissions policies at colleges and universities," while improving educational opportunities for all children regardless of color.
