All regulations have zero benefits:
Thursday morning, the House Freedom Caucus, the main group representing the far right of House Republicans, released an ambitious regulatory — or, really, deregulatory — agenda for the Trump administration to pursue. It consists of a detailed, agency-by-agency list of regulations, mostly imposed during President Obama’s administration, that it would like to see repealed or rolled back.
The Trump administration likely won’t do 100 percent of what’s on the menu here, but in his Cabinet appointments Trump has largely assembled a team of down-the-line conservatives, so it’s a good look at the direction policy is likely to take. For your reading pleasure, we’re providing a summary of the main highlights, organized by topic rather than by agency, since citizens are probably more interested in what’s going to be changing than in how the bureaucratic boxes line up.
To get a flavor for what’s in store, there is one line in the extensive document really worth reading. The Freedom Caucus places each of 228 regulations slated for elimination into a grid, one of whose columns is cost — and in most cases they do, indeed, provide an estimated cost of compliance with the regulation divorced from any discussion of the benefits. When it comes to Rule 211, network neutrality, however, they simply state: “All regulations carry costs, which are inevitably passed on to consumers in one form or another.”
It’s not clear exactly where the Freedom Caucus got this idea or why they think it’s true, but as a broad philosophical statement it’s admirably clear and concise. The network neutrality rule’s proponents say that given the lack of competition in wireless broadband markets, requiring infrastructure owners to treat all internet traffic the same is useful in promoting competition among online services and minimizing infrastructure monopolists’ ability to extract monopoly profits. One might or might not agree with that analysis, but from a normal person’s point of view it would at least be a question worth asking.
The Freedom Caucus view, by contrast, is that all you really need to know about Network Neutrality regulations — or any other kind of regulation — is that it is a regulation and all regulations, by definition, are costly. It’s simply not possible to imagine a rule that corrects for negative externalities, asymmetrical information, imperfect competition, myopia, or any other problem in a socially beneficial way.
via www.vox.com
Here is an excerpt from page 16 of the first 100 days report (download: Meadows_Rules_and_Regulations):
As you can see, there is attention paid to the cost of the regulation but not the benefit. Here is a table from the executive summary of the Regulatory Impact Analysis for the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Ozone:
It is clear where the House Freedom Caucus got the $1.4 billion cost number. They relied on the EPA analysis. It is also clear that they choose to ignore $2.9 to $5.9 billion of health benefits.
