CEI Podcast for June 13, 2012: Smarter Transportation Funding

Posted on June 13, 2012 | Comments Off on CEI Podcast for June 13, 2012: Smarter Transportation Funding


Have a listen here.

When the federal government gives out transportation funding to the states, it attaches a lot of strings. The solution, according to Land-use and Transportation Policy Analyst Marc Scribner, is to get the federal government out of the transportation business and devolve it to the states. In the just-released CEI study “Fixing Surface Transportation in Massachusetts: A Path Forward under a Devolved Federal Funding Scenario,” Scribner argues that by following a user-pays, user-benefits principle, states can raise revenue and maintain infrastructure more efficiently than the federal government can.

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Posted in CEI Podcast, Spending

Innovation Is Cool

Posted on June 12, 2012 | Comments Off on Innovation Is Cool

Touchscreen phones and tablets are wonderful devices. But touchscreen typing is cumbersome compared to a traditional keyboard. Worry not, though: some clever souls have invented a workaround:

Tactus provides a new dimension to touchscreens by enabling real, physical buttons that rise up from the surface on demand, and then recede back into the screen, leaving a perfectly flat, transparent surface when gone.

Cool.

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Posted in Innovation, Technology

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On the Radio – Regulation

Posted on June 12, 2012 | Comments Off on On the Radio – Regulation

In about ten minutes, I’ll be on Twin Cities News Talk AM1130’s “This Week in Regulation” to talk about, well, regulation.

You should be able to listen live from here.

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Posted in Media Appearances, regulation

Nowhere to Go but Up

Posted on June 12, 2012 | Comments Off on Nowhere to Go but Up

Congressional approval ratings are up drastically. They are now 17 percent, up from a record-low 10 percent in February.

This being an election year, Congress is intentionally doing nothing of substance so voters will have fewer things to be mad about.

This may well be one instance where correlation does, in fact, equal causation.

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Posted in Political Animals

CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

Posted on June 11, 2012 | Comments Off on CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation


Just another week in the world of regulation:

  • 65 new final rules were published last week, up from 58 the previous (holiday-shortened) week. That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every 2 hours and 35 minutes — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. All in all, 1,629 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year. If this keeps up, the total tally for 2012 will be 3,726 new rules.
  • 1,298 new pages were added to the 2012 Federal Register last week, for a total of 34,127 pages. At this pace, the 2012 Federal Register will run 76,863 pages.
  • Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. The 24 such rules published so far in 2012 have compliance costs of at least $14.5 billion. Two of the rules do not have cost estimates, and a third cost estimate does not give a total annual cost. We assume that rules lacking this basic transparency measure cost the bare minimum of $100 million per year. The true cost is almost certainly higher.
  • No economically significant rules were published last week. So far, 187 significant final rules have been published in 2012.
  • So far this year, 311 final rules affect small businesses. 50 of them are significant rules.

Highlights from final rules published last week:

For more data, updated daily, go to TenThousandCommandments.com.

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Posted in regulation

Stigler on the Regulatory Mindset

Posted on June 8, 2012 | Comments Off on Stigler on the Regulatory Mindset

George Stigler was a Nobel-winning economist who applied the economic way of thinking to regulation at a time when doing so was even more unfashionable than it is today. He was also known for his wit.

Near the end of his paper “The Economists’ Traditional Theory of the Economic Functions of the State,” which appears as chapter 7 in his 1975 collection The Citizen and the State: Essays on Regulation, he has a pithy public choice-style insight (p. 112):

We have a long, long list of market failures. These should be corrected if possible, and there are only two alternatives to the market: the state, and prayer. It turns out the two were merged in one.

There’s a lot packed into that bit of pith. Intentionally or not, Stigler was referring to what Harold Demsetz called the Nirvana fallacy. The relevant comparison isn’t between market outcomes and perfection; it’s between market outcomes and possible improvements. This is where economists’ never-ending focus on perfect competition models comes back to bite them in the rear end. Economists and regulators alike pray fervently.

Unable to escape from Hayek’s knowledge problem and public choice concerns such as regulatory capture, regulations not only routinely fail to improve on market outcomes, they often make make matters worse.

As Arnold Kling pointed out, the lesson learned isn’t the idealistic Chicago school motto, “Markets work well. Use markets,” nor is it the Nirvana fallacy-prone MIT-Harvard dictum, “Markets fail. Use government.” It’s the realist GMU-style “Markets fail. Use markets.”

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Posted in Economics, Pith, regulation

Regulation of the Day 220: Driver’s Side Mirrors

Posted on June 8, 2012 | Comments Off on Regulation of the Day 220: Driver’s Side Mirrors


R. Andrew Hicks, a Drexel University math professor, has invented a driver’s side mirror that eliminates the dangerous blind spot that traditional mirrors have. But federal regulations are preventing car manufacturers from using his potentially life-saving invention.

The improved mirrors give a 45-degree field of view, compared to 15 to 17 degrees for traditional flat mirrors. And they do it without giving the distorted fish-eye view that plagues curved mirrors. Prof. Hicks told the website Phys.org how it works:

“Imagine that the mirror’s surface is made of many smaller mirrors turned to different angles, like a disco ball,” Hicks said. “The algorithm is a set of calculations to manipulate the direction of each face of the metaphorical disco ball so that each ray of light bouncing off the mirror shows the driver a wide, but not-too-distorted, picture of the scene behind him.”

Pretty ingenious, frankly. And unlike many ivory tower projects, this could save lives. The trouble is that federal regulations require side mirrors to be flat. The rule made sense because, until now, curved wide-view mirrors give such a distorted view that their safety benefits are dubious at best.

Prof. Hicks’ mirrors are curved, which is why they violate federal rules for standard equipment. Of course, the curves are non-uniform with tens of thousands of inflection points, which is why they give triple the field of view with distortion comparable to flat mirrors. Regulations would do better to focus on distortion or field of view than on whether or not a mirror is curved.

Regulators should modernize mirror regulations post-haste so that car manufacturers can make Prof. Hicks’ mirrors standard equipment. As it is now, drivers could buy and install the mirrors themselves. But millions more people would benefit if car manufacturers were able to make them standard equipment.

Or, better yet, regulators could get out of the way altogether so that people like Prof. Hicks can save lives without having to say “Sir, may I?”

You can read Prof. Hicks’ paper in which he explains his invention here.

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Posted in Regulation of the Day

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CEI Podcast for June 7, 2012: MACT the Knife

Posted on June 7, 2012 | Comments Off on CEI Podcast for June 7, 2012: MACT the Knife


Have a listen here.

A new EPA regulation, the Utility MACT, is intended to cut mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants. According to the EPA’s own estimates, the rule is one of the most expensive in history. Are the costs worth it? Policy Analyst David Bier, co-author of a forthcoming CEI study, thinks the answer is no.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Ten Thousand Commandments and Growing

Posted on June 7, 2012 | Comments Off on Ten Thousand Commandments and Growing

Over at The Washington Times, Wayne Crews and I praise President Obama’s recent regulatory reforms. They’re small, but they’re better than nothing:

The estimated savings total up to about $10 billion over five years. Cass Sunstein, who heads Mr. Obama’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget, sees this as a significant achievement. Of course, federal regulations cost more than 500 times that much – more than a trillion dollars annually – so this is a curious use of the word “significant.”

We also lay out some potential next steps:

  • Implement a bipartisan, annual Regulatory Reduction Commission to vote up or down on a package of rules to eliminate in one sweep.
  • Institute a freeze on federal rule-making in order to rediscover federalism. Many health and safety matters are best left to states.
  • Hold hearings on Sen. Mark R. Warner’s “one-in, one-out” requirement for any new rule, which, for some reason, he isn’t talking about much lately but should be.
  • Increase exemptions for small businesses, which can least afford regulatory costs.

Read the whole thing here. More reform ideas are in the new 2012 edition of Wayne’s “Ten Thousand Commandments” study.

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Posted in Publications, regulation

Washington’s Ten Thousand Commandments

Posted on June 6, 2012 | Comments Off on Washington’s Ten Thousand Commandments

The 2012 edition of “Ten Thousand Commandments” is out now. If you don’t feel like reading all 66 pages (though I recommend you do!), Wayne Crews and I sum up the main findings and offer a few institution-level reforms in a short piece at The American Spectator:

Politicians love to blame unregulated markets for America’s economic troubles. But… those unregulated markets are hard to find. The federal government lists all of its regulations in the Code of Federal Regulations. It is more than 169,000 pages long and growing. Last year alone, 3,807 new final rules were published in the Federal Register — more than 10 per day. In 2010, it was 3,573 new rules.

And here’s just one of our reform ideas:

Just as Congress is supposed to pass a budget every year for what it spends, it should pass a regulatory budget. If it caps regulatory burdens at, say, $1 trillion, it would then have to prioritize which rules it believes provide the most bang for the buck. Voters would also know when Congress votes to increase regulatory costs, giving members at least some incentive to keep regulation in check.

The fight for real regulatory reform is a long one, not least because neither party has shown the seriousness needed to see it through. But the only way to win is to fight.

Read the whole thing here.

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Posted in regulation