Tag Archives: Regulation

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Mitt Romney on global warming, climate change, environmental regulations

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An alarming article from the Washington Examiner about Mitt Romney’s environmental regulations on business.

Excerpt:

Make no mistake, if Mitt Romney secures the nomination, the Tea Party almost assuredly suffers a mortal wound.  As Newt Gingrich just said, while Romney is an exceptionally nice person and a very hard worker, he is also a Rockefeller Republican.

As their standard bearer going into battle with Barack Obama next fall, do Republican primary voters really want the person who drew up the blueprint for Obama-care?

Worse, do Republican primary voters really want the person who the out-of-control job and freedom killing Obama EPA looked to for some of its most draconian ideas?

As reported in the conservative blogs Moonbattery and HOTAIR; “the Romney administration in 2005 essentially did what Barack Obama’s EPA wants to do now.  He imposed CO2 emission caps — the “toughest in the nation” — in an effort to curtail traditional energy production.

“Not only did Romney impose these costly new regulations, he then imposed price caps to keep power companies from passing the cost along to the consumer.  As we have seen in Romney-Care, regulation and price controls eventually drive businesses into bankruptcy or relocation.”

More chilling than that bit of socialist nanny-state big government interference is who Romney looked to for advice regarding the plan.   As reported by these two conservative sites, it was none other than Obama’s Chief “science” adviser, John Holdren.

Are you kidding me?  Is anyone in the GOP paying attention to what is going on here?  Is the Republican establishment so desperate to hold on to its power that it will continually look the other way as a chameleon-like candidate not only dreams up the ideas used by far-left Obama White House, but praises one of the people most reviled by the conservative movement?

With regard to this subject, then-Gov. Romney’s office trumpeted its energy and job-killing plan by saying in part: “Today’s regulations will achieve our aggressive environmental goals and provide incentives to push technological development,” said Stephen Pritchard, Secretary of Environmental Affairs.

“In the development of greenhouse gas policy, Romney Administration officials have elicited input from environmental and economic policy experts.

“These include John Holdren,professor of environmental policy at Harvard University and chair of the NationalCommission on Energy Policy and Billy Pizer, an economist at Resources for the Future, anenvironmental policy think-tank based in Washington D.C”

Again, is anyone paying attention to these surreal, anything but conservative, facts?

Governor Romney’s office then closed the memo by proudly stating:

“Implementing these regulations represents the latest in a series of initiatives that theRomney administration has undertaken to address air pollution.

“In 2004, Governor Romney announced the Massachusetts Climate Protection Plan, which laid out acoordinated statewide response to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect the climate.”

You can’t make this up.  Something that sounds as if it was drafted in the bowels of the Obama EPA was actually part of a memo released with great fan-fare by Governor Romney on December 7, 2005.

Do you remember who John Holdren is? Let me help.

Excerpt:

President Obama’s “science czar,” John Holdren, once floated the idea of forced abortions, “compulsory sterilization,” and the creation of a “Planetary Regime” that would oversee human population levels and control all natural resources as a means of protecting the planet — controversial ideas his critics say should have been brought up in his Senate confirmation hearings.

[…]…many of Holdren’s radical ideas on population control were not brought up at his confirmation hearings; it appears that the senators who scrutinized him had no knowledge of the contents of a textbook he co-authored in 1977, “Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment,” a copy of which was obtained by FOXNews.com.The 1,000-page course book, which was co-written with environmental activists Paul and Anne Ehrlich, discusses and in one passage seems to advocate totalitarian measures to curb population growth, which it says could cause an environmental catastrophe.

The three authors summarize their guiding principle in a single sentence: “To provide a high quality of life for all, there must be fewer people.”

As first reported by FrontPage Magazine, Holdren and his co-authors spend a portion of the book discussing possible government programs that could be used to lower birth rates.

Those plans include forcing single women to abort their babies or put them up for adoption; implanting sterilizing capsules in people when they reach puberty; and spiking water reserves and staple foods with a chemical that would make people sterile.

To help achieve those goals, they formulate a “world government scheme” they call the Planetary Regime, which  would administer the world’s resources and human growth, and they discuss the development of an “armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force” to which nations would surrender part of their sovereignty.

Is that what Mitt Romney believes, too? It would be consistent with his other liberal views.

Click here to learn more about Mitt Romney’s political views on abortion, gay rights, health care, gun control and other issues.

News

Dodd-Frank causes Bank of America to cut 30,000 jobs and raise debit card fees

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From the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

What is the cost of overregulation? Bank of America appears to have provided part of the answer by announcing yesterday that the nation’s largest bank will cut 30,000 jobs between now and 2014. CEO Brian Moynihan said the bank’s plan is to slash $5 billion in annual expenses from its consumer businesses.

Mr. Moynihan didn’t say this, but we will: These layoffs are part of the bill for the last two years of Washington’s financial rule-writing. After loose monetary policy had combined with insane housing policy to create a financial crisis, the Democrats who ran Washington in 2009 and 2010 enacted myriad new rules that had nothing to do with easy money or housing.

Take the amendment that Illinois Democrat and Senator Dick Durbin (with the help of 17 Senate Republicans) attached to last year’s Dodd-Frank financial law. Mr. Durbin’s amendment instructed the Federal Reserve to limit the amount of “swipe fees” that banks can charge merchants when customers use debit cards.

How exactly does forcing banks to charge Wal-Mart less money for operating an electronic payment system prevent the next financial crisis? Readers may wait a long time for a satisfactory answer, but the cost of this Dodd-Frank directive is straightforward.

The Fed dutifully ordered banks to cut their fees almost in half. Bank of America disclosed in its most recent quarterly report that this change will reduce the bank’s debit-card revenues by $475 million in just the fourth quarter of this year. The new rules take effect on October 1, so BofA seems to have sensible timing as it begins to shed workers from a consumer business that has become suddenly less profitable by federal edict.

Make that the latest federal edict. In 2009, when a comprehensive overhaul of financial regulation was still a gleam in Barney Frank’s eye, President Obama signed the CARD Act into law. It limited the ability of banks to increase rates on delinquent borrowers and to charge fees on unprofitable customers. As Washington encouraged card issuers to be more selective in advancing credit and to demand higher rates when they do, interest rates on card customers predictably increased relative to other types of lending in the months after the law took effect.

Restricting bank profits on a particular product may have obvious populist appeal, but politicians shouldn’t be surprised if banks decide that such consumer credit operations aren’t good businesses and can function with fewer employees. Add in the various federal programs aimed at extracting penalties for this or that mortgage-foreclosure error and it’s understandable that a bank would have trouble forecasting growth to justify its current work force.

But that’s not all. The Dodd-Frank regulation also caused Bank of America to raise fees on debit cards to $5 a month ($60 a year).

Excerpt:

Throwing their weight around at the height of the banking crisis, House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut vowed to stick it to banks. They blamed them for the mess to cover up the fact that they forced banks to lend to favored constituencies who could not repay.

The two Democrats pushed through the much-vaunted Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which President Obama signed and touted as one of the signature accomplishments of his presidency.

That act, which included a micromanaging amendment on fees, carried a $2.9 billion implementation cost for that alone over five years, according to the Government Accountability Office.

It was nothing but the same old pandering to special interests. Named after Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, the amendment limited fees that banks can collect from sellers when their customers make debit card purchases — cutting 44 cent fees to 21 cents.

That little bomb is now why battered Bank of America has no choice but to impose a $5 monthly fee — $60 a year — to consumers to make up for lost revenue.

The “economics of offering a debit card have changed with recent regulations,” a bank spokeswoman told ABC News Friday.

BofA says it stands to lose $2 billion from the arbitrary Durbin price-fixing amendment and now has no choice but to make up for the lost revenue some other way.

Now that consumers will be stuck with that fee, they can thank Dodd, Frank and Obama for that special little spike in inflation tailored just for them.

Other banks, by the way, might follow. And like banks, consumers may respond in a way that is logical to their interests, too.

If there is one person who is to blame for this recession, it’s Barney Frank. Chris Dodd isn’t far behind. Who elected these people, and do they understand economics? I think not.

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News

House passes bill to protect cement industry from job-killing EPA regulations

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The EPA is considering regulations that would kill American jobs by the bushel.

Excerpt:

According to [Sen. James] Inhofe, the administration’s proposed CO2/greenhouse gas-emission regulations—due out in November—could chop $300 billion to $400 billion alone off the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) each year.  Estimates from the Senate Energy and Public Works Committee’s Republican staff estimates this regulation could cost in excess of the 2 million jobs that would have been lost as a result of Waxman-Markey Climate Change Bill.

Other estimates suggest that the EPA’s Utility MACT and Transport Rule could cost $184 billion and 1.4 million jobs.  Statistics Inhofe provided suggest the rule could shutter hundreds of coal-fired power plants around the country—equaling as much as 20% of the nation’s total energy output.

[…]“We are relying on coal for as much as 45% of our nation’s energy,” Inhofe said.  “He’s intentionally passed a rule that will shut down coal in America, and there are lots of jobs that either directly or indirectly rely on coal.  It’s going to make it a lot much more expensive.”

These increased costs are underscored by a  Bernstein Research report that found:  “We expect the loss of this generation to translate into higher wholesale energy and capacity prices.  … We estimate that this will raise the price of electricity during on-peak hours by $3 to $5 per MWh.”

The rule’s impact hit closer to home for 120 workers at a Cincinnati-area coal-fired power plant when Duke Energy announced it would be closing the plant if the rule is approved in November.

“The anticipated retirement date is contingent on potential changes to the implementation [of the] EPA’s MACT rule and other environmental regulations,” Duke Energy said in a statement released in July.

And Texas-based Luminant followed suit last week, announcing it would be laying off 500 workers in anticipation of the implementation of the EPA’s cross-state air pollution rule, set to take effect on Jan. 1, 2012.

[…]The National Associations of Manufacturers estimates the Utility MACT and cross-state air pollution rules will cost its members $18 billion annually, and drive its members’ electricity costs up by 11.5%.  It also shares Inhofe’s analysis that these regulations could cost 1.4 million jobs annually.

But there is some good news from the Energy and Commerce Committee.

Excerpt:

The U.S. House of Representatives declared another victory today in its ongoing battle against destructive regulation with passage of H.R. 2681, the Cement Sector Regulatory Relief Act. The measure passed the full House with strong bipartisan support by a vote of 262 to 161.

H.R. 2681, authored by Reps. John Sullivan (R-OK) and Mike Ross (D-AR), will protect the domestic cement manufacturing industry from costly new rules issued by the EPA, which currently threaten widespread plant closures and thousands of American jobs. This legislation provides a remedy to EPA’s flawed cement MACT rules with a directive to EPA to propose achievable standards and timelines. This legislation will ensure public health and the environment is protected without sacrificing jobs.

“President Obama likes to talk about the need to invest in our nation’s infrastructure and this bipartisan legislation will remove regulatory barriers to growth in the construction and cement manufacturing industries,” said Sullivan. “The bottom line is that if EPA’s Cement MACT rules are not revised, thousands of jobs will be lost due to cement plant closures and higher construction costs. These rules threaten to shut down up to 20 percent of the nation’s cement manufacturing plants in the next two years, sending thousands of jobs permanently overseas and driving up cement and construction costs across the country.  Additionally, the Portland Cement Association estimates it will cost $3.4 billion – half of the industry’s annual revenues – just to comply with EPA’s current Cement MACT rule.”

I was surprised that a Democrat supported this bill, but it’s really important to protect American jobs.