“Dangerous ‘Intended’ Consequences”: The Laughable Logic Behind Marco Rubio’s Plan To Limit Government Regulation
Republicans like to talk about government in the broadest, most abstract terms—arguing that it’s too big, too intrusive, and too expensive. The argument plays well politically, since the public tends to agree. But it also allows Republicans to avoid talking about real trade-offs—like the fact that government unemployment checks help people pay their bills while they are out of work, or that government guidelines for product safety keep kids safe when they play with toys. So perhaps it’s no surprise that the latest big idea from Republicans is a “national regulatory budget”—a proposal by Senator Marco Rubio that, however sensible sounding, could force government to scale back protections that people very much need.
Under Rubio’s plan, an independent agency would calculate the economic costs of all existing regulations. Congress would then set an upper limit on how much regulations can cost the economy—and use that figure to establish caps for each individual federal agency. What would that mean in practice? Imagine that the Environmental Protection Agency wanted to impose a new regulation on pollution. If the EPA was already at its limit, it would have to rescind an old regulation (or regulations) in order to make room.
“The essence of this proposal is a budget accounting mechanism—a one in requires one out. So one regulation in requires a similar regulation to be repealed,” said Amit Narang, a policy advocate at Public Citizen and an expert on the federal regulatory process. “The premise of the legislation is that we are currently at the perfect level of regulation. We don’t need anymore.”
One of Rubio’s goals is to force regulatory agencies to go back through old regulations and eliminate outdated and costly ones. There’s a strong case for that: Government agencies don’t do this very often and plenty of duplicative, cumbersome regulations exist. But Rubio’s method for forcing agencies to review past regulations is clumsy—and, according to many experts, dangerous. Among other things, the plan requires agencies to eliminate a regulation (or regulations) with the same economic cost as the new one. If the EPA wants to impose a major regulation (such as one on coal-fired power plants), it would have to rollback a significant one in return. “It’s not out of the realm of possibility to imagine this kind of budgetary system resulting in, say, the EPA, in order to put forward new chemical regulations—maybe they would have to repeal old lead regulations,” Narang said.
Rubio seems to think that Congress can set an arbitrary cap on the burden of regulations, at the precise level where agencies can ensure public safety without unduly hurting the economy. “This would force federal agencies to enact only those regulations that truly serve an essential role,” Rubio said in a speech at Google’s Washington D.C. headquarters on Monday. “It would put in place and enshrine the cost-benefit analysis and the regulatory framework that we are lacking right now.” Rubio is right that under his plan, federal agencies would have to evaluate their regulations and repeal the ones that had the worst cost-benefit ratio. But Congress could easily set the cap at a level which would force agencies to eliminate regulations whose benefits exceed their costs. That’s a dangerous unintended (or maybe intended) consequence of his proposal.
The ultimate problem with Rubio’s plan is that it actually has nothing to do with cost-benefit analysis. On the contrary, it sets a cap based solely on the economic costs of regulations, regardless of their benefits. Rubio wants agencies to evaluate the current costs and benefits of old regulations (they already do so with new ones), but he wants to ensure that even if the benefits exceed the costs, federal agencies will be forced to do away with many regulations anyway. Rubio says he wants to ensure a rigorous analysis of our regulatory system. What he really wants to do is rig the game.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, March 11, 2014
“Returning To The Days Of Recalcitrance”: Rubio Demands States’ Right To Ignore The Poor
For a senator who likes to hold himself out as the future of the Republican brand, Marco Rubio has come up with a remarkably retrograde contribution to the party’s chorus of phony empathy for the poor: Let the states do it.
All anti-poverty funds should be combined into one “flex fund,” he said in a speech on Wednesday, and then given to the states to spend as they see fit. He actually believes that states will “design and fund creative initiatives” to address inequality.
“Washington continues to rule over the world of anti-poverty policy-making, with beltway bureaucrats picking and choosing rigid nationwide programs and forcing America’s elected state legislatures to watch from the sidelines,” he said. “As someone who served nine years in the state house, two of them as Speaker, I know how frustrating this is.”
Do-nothing legislators in states like Mr. Rubio’s Florida feel frustrated precisely because most federal safety-net programs are designed to limit the ability of states to refuse to help their less fortunate residents. As Lyndon Johnson knew from personal experience in 1964, when he began the War on Poverty, states could not be trusted to properly address the poverty in their midst. Or, to put it another way, certain states could be trusted to yell and scream and fight to the end for their right to do as little as possible.
One of the great achievements of the War on Poverty programs was to extend the safety net to the South, where white legislators saw little reason to spend taxpayer dollars on the basic needs of poor citizens, most of whom were black. Southern lawmakers in Congress fought for the right of governors to veto grants made possible by the Economic Opportunity Act, one of the centerpieces of the War on Poverty, and Southern governors exercised those vetoes repeatedly. But Sargent Shriver, director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, overrode those vetoes, bypassing the governors and sending anti-poverty money directly to the local agencies and community groups that could do some good with it.
If you think those days of recalcitrance are over, take a look at the map of the states that have refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. The list of 25 includes every one of the states that seceded from the union, with the exception of Arkansas, which is doing only a partial expansion. (Virginia is likely to accept the expansion after its newly elected Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe, takes office later this week.)
But long before “Obamacare” became a curse word among Republicans, most of those same states were already stingy with their spending on Medicaid, which lets states determine who is eligible for the program. The 16 states that restricted Medicaid to those making half or less of the federal poverty line included the usual cast of characters: Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. The most generous states — giving Medicaid benefits to those at the poverty line or higher — were clustered in the Northeast and the upper Midwest, along with California.
That’s undoubtedly fine with Mr. Rubio and other Republicans who see nothing wrong with a country that is a patchwork of generosity and indifference.
“It’s wrong for Washington to tell Tallahassee what programs are right for the people of Florida,” Mr. Rubio said. “But it’s particularly wrong for it to say that what’s right for Tallahassee is the same thing that’s right for Topeka and Sacramento and Detroit and Manhattan and every other town, city and state in the country.”
That battle, though, was fought and lost by Southerners 50 years ago, just as they lost a far bloodier states’ rights battle a century earlier. The country long ago came to the conclusion that economic rights, just like voting rights and criminal rights, had to be uniform. As much as it might frustrate Mr. Rubio, people should not be made to suffer just because they were born in an uncaring state.
By: David Firestone, Editors Blog, The New York Times, January 9, 2014
“Not So Easy Rider”: Marco Rubio, From GOP “Savior” To Tea Party Troll In 12 Months
You can understand why Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) is bitter.
While Senators Rand Paul (R-KY) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) became Tea Party rock stars this year with high-profile but legislatively inconsequential filibusters, Rubio went from right-wing hero to RINO by risking his career to back a comprehensive immigration reform bill that actually passed the Senate.
Initially, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) was supportive of “the Republican Savior” as he tried to accomplish the only policy recommendation Republicans gave themselves in their 2012 election “autopsy.” But the GOP base as represented by the Tea Partiers in the House refused to let Speaker John Boehner even consider letting the Senate bill come up for a vote.
As the far right organized against what they called his “shamnesty” bill, Rubio saw his dream of locking up the 2016 GOP nomination early suddenly replaced with billboards condemning the “Rubio-Obama immigration plan.”
To try to win back the base, Rubio joined with Cruz and Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) in the failed plot to defund Obamacare. When that wasn’t enough, he actually turned against his own bill.
So you can imagine how steamed Senator Rubio was when he heard Paul Ryan being praised as a “dealmaker” for putting together a budget deal that basically re-enforces the status quo.
Well, you don’t have to imagine. Rubio almost immediately went on the attack against the proposed legislation after it was announced, saying not only was he against it, he was pretty sure it would be responsible for destroying the American Dream.
Ryan heard that criticism Thursday morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and fired back with a deft response.
“Read the deal and get back to me,” he said. “People are going to do what they need to do. Look, in the minority you don’t have the burden of governing.”
Republicans have stopped trying to hide the fact that there is a civil war going on between the Tea Party and the establishment.
Both of the leaders in the Senate — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn (R-TX) — are among the half-dozen Senate Republicans facing Tea Party primary challengers.
McConnell has been calling out the right-wing outside groups who are funding many of the challengers against him for weeks.
“I think, honestly, many of [the Tea Party] have been misled,” he told the Wall St. Journal’s Peggy Noonan in November. “They’ve been told the reason we can’t get to better outcomes than we’ve gotten is not because the Democrats control the Senate and the White House but because Republicans have been insufficiently feisty. Well, that’s just not true, and I think that the folks that I have difficulty with are the leaders of some of these groups who basically mislead them for profit… They raise money… take their cut and spend it.”
Boehner joined the fight this week by blasting the outside groups that he now says led to the shutdown.
“They’re using our members and they’re using the American people for their own goals,” Boehner said in a press conference on Thursday. “This is ridiculous. If you’re for more deficit reduction, you’re for this agreement.”
And Paul Ryan is making a case that being a conservative means accepting reality and actually governing.
Senator Rubio has given up on governance and moved as far to the right as he can go without falling off the game board. And he’s still being overshadowed by even more outlandish Tea Partiers.
That won’t stop him from trying to score points wherever he can. But even if he ends up opposing the immigration bills that will likely come out of the House now that the leadership has cut the Tea Party loose, chances are the only thing Marco Rubio will ever be president of is the Ted Cruz fan club.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, December 12, 2013
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