Congress empowers the causes of crises:Themselves.
[WSJ] President Obama hailed the financial bill that House-Senate negotiators finally vouchsafed at 5:40 a.m. Friday, and no wonder. The bill represents the triumph of the very regulators and Congressmen who did so much to foment the financial panic, giving them vast new discretion over every corner of American financial markets.
Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, those Fannie Mae cheerleaders, played the largest role in writing the bill. Congressman Paul Kanjorski even offered a motion to memorialize it as the Dodd-Frank Act. It’s as if Tony Hayward of BP were allowed to write new rules on deep water drilling.
The Federal Reserve, which promoted the housing mania and failed utterly in its core mission of monitoring Citigroup, will now have more power to regulate more financial institutions and more ability to dictate the allocation of credit.
The Treasury, which bailed out institutions willy-nilly without consistent rules, will now lead the Financial Stability Oversight Council that will have the arbitrary power to define which financial companies pose a “systemic risk” and which can be shut down without recourse to bankruptcy. Willy-nilly will now be the law.
And the SEC, which created the credit-ratings oligopoly and missed Bernie Madoff, will get new powers to decide how easy it should be for union pension funds to get their candidates on corporate proxy ballots.
Oh, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? They aren’t touched at all, even as they continue to lose billions of taxpayer dollars each quarter.
In other words, our Washington rulers have taken 2,000 or so pages to double and triple down on the old system that failed.
It gets worse. Not only did the bill not address bank regulations, something our not so watchdog media failed to recognize, it actually added a $19 billion tax to pay for all this new “regulation.” Question for the Obama camp: When you’ve already got 10% unemployment how will raising taxes create incentive for companies to hire more workers? Good luck with that election come November’s stagnant 10% unemployment rate.
And if you think our hyper-regulations already made no sense, check out how the EPA considers spilt milk an “oil spill.” (Thanks to John Stossel for pointing this out):
The chattering classes shout that the BP spill proves we need more regulation. I’ve argued no — just look at the track record of the regulators we already have. Just before the spill, they were about to nominate BP for a safety award.
This month, EPA officials outdid themselves to show why goverment should be given less, not more, authority. The Holland Sentinel reports:
New Environmental Protection Agency regulations treat spilled milk like oil, requiring farmers to build extra storage tanks and form emergency spill plans. …
“It’s just another, unnecessary over-regulation by the government just lacking any common sense,” said Bill Robb, dairy educator for Michigan State University Extension.
Why would the government make such a ridiculous demand? The EPA explanation:
EPA regulations state that “milk typically contains a percentage of animal fat, which is a non-petroleum oil. Thus, containers storing milk are subject to the Oil Spill Prevention, Control and Countermeasure Program rule …”
Only a government bureaucrat could think that would be a good idea.