Regs

Ten Thousand Commandments 2023 An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State  Clyde Wayne Crews 

 Although the Federal Register has always been the primary document for cataloging regulations, it has recently under Trump chronicled their partial reduction, although a look at the daily Federal Register may not have given that impression. Reducing regulations requires writing rules too, which can continue to expand the Federal Register. Shortcomings notwithstanding, it is worthwhile to track the Federal Register’s page counts, particularly because under the Biden administration, offsetting deregulatory rules are no longer part of the bulk.

Joe Biden has restored the 80,000-page Federal Register as the norm. On December 30, 2022, the Federal Register closed out at 80,756 pages (up 10 percent from 73,321 at the end of Biden’s first year), a figure that will adjust downward slightly by a few hundred pages in the final National Archives reckoning and be taken into account later.

 

The California Effect and Red State Pushback

At NYT, Conor Dougherty reports that California Assembly Member Buffy Wicks (D) declined to run for the House because she could accomplish more as a state legislator.

Consider, she said, an internet-privacy bill she drafted last year, called the Age-Appropriate Design Code. It requires websites to ratchet up their default privacy settings to protect children from online tracking and data collection. The bill was signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom over the opposition of the tech industry, which argued that it was too complicated to implement and tantamount to a state law setting national policy. That, in fact, was the point: Wicks passed the law with help from a member of Britain’s House of Lords, who had created similar regulations in her country, in the hope that if Britain and California passed the same rules, a global standard was likely to follow.

California has been so successful at bending national policy in its direction that academics have taken to calling the phenomenon the California effect. From labor and consumer protections to corporate governance, energy and animal-welfare measures, California’s laws are the most widely copied in the nation. Most corporations can’t afford to ignore its mammoth market (its $3.6 trillion economy is the world’s fifth-largest, exceeding India’s); they often end up adopting California’s rules across the country because doing so is cheaper than trying to craft two separate sets of products and policies.

For decades, California has been able to fund a sprawling administration whose agencies have federal-size budgets and wide latitude to set and enforce rules. But as the nation has fractured along cultural and economic lines, Republican governors, like Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida, have sought to experiment with legislative activism of their own — a kind of anti-California effect. Recently, a number of red states have tried to create conservative guidelines for textbooks, explored ways of preventing companies from paying for employees’ abortions, tried to stop (or at least slow) the move away from fossil fuels and sought to limit Medicaid patients’ access to gender-transition care.

TikTok, Montana, and the Dormant Commerce Clause

 Montana has banned TikTok, which is suing.

119. The Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power to regulate commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States. U.S. Const. art. 1, § 8, cl. 3. While the Commerce Clause is framed by its text [as] an affirmative grant ofpower to Congress , the so-called Dormant component of the Clause has long been recognized as a self-executing limitation ofthe States to enact laws imposing substantial burdens on [interstate] commerce ." South-Central Timber Dev.,Inc. v.Wunnicke ,467 U.S.82 ,87 (1984).

 120. The TikTok Ban imposes substantial burdens on interstate commerce inviolation of the Commerce Clause and other structural provisions ofthe Constitution by prohibiting Plaintiff from operating TikTok in Montana and penalizing Plaintiff any time a user in Montana accesses TikTok or is offered the ability to access or download TikTok in the State . The TikTok Ban is not limited to Montana residents ; it applies to anyone in the State ,including those visiting or merely passing through for work.

121. Substantial burdens on interstate commerce generally result from inconsistent regulation ofactivities that are inherently national or require a uniform system of regulation. Bernstein v.Virgin Am.,Inc.,3 F.4th 1127, 1135 (9th Cir. 2021) (quoting Nat'lAss'n of Optometrists & Opticians v. Harris,682 F.3d 1144, 1148 (9th Cir.2012)).

122. Plaintiff's operation of TikTok ,an application used by over 150million users in the United States ,including in every State, is inherently national in scope and requires a uniform system of regulation, not one subject to the policy decisions offifty separate States.

 

 

Tech Beats Antitrust Push

 Emily Birnbaum at Bloomberg:

A passionate and bipartisan legislative effort to rein in the country’s largest technology companies collapsed this week, the victim of an epic lobbying campaign by Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta.

The internet titans spent hundreds of millions of dollars, sent their chief executives to Washington and deployed trade groups and sympathetic scholars to quash two antitrust bills co-sponsored by Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican. The companies treated the bills like an existential threat.The years-long US legislative effort, which harnessed outrage over tech companies’ power and dominance, would have cracked down on the practices of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon.com Inc, Meta Platforms Inc. and Apple Inc. for the first time in the nearly three decades since the internet was unveiled to the public.

The closely-watched bills advanced farther than any other antitrust overhaul in decades and emerged from an 18-month House investigation led by Rhode Island Democrat David Cicilline. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act would have prevented the tech giants from using their platforms to disadvantage competitors, while the Open App Markets Act would have pared back Apple and Google’s control over app stores.Despite an aggressive eleventh-hour push, the bills were not included in the end-of-year spending package released Monday, the final shot this year. The Senate included a narrower trio of antitrust bills in the end-of-year spending package. That legislation will give more money and resources to the country’s top antitrust regulators, marking the first time Congress has voted to expand antitrust enforcement measures in decades. But those provisions will not make the sweeping changes to the law that some advocates hoped for.

Housing in California

 In November, Noah Buhayar and Christopher Cannon reported at Bloomberg:

The median price for a house now tops $600,000, more than twice the national level. The state has four of the country’s five most expensive residential markets—Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Orange County and San Diego. (Los Angeles is seventh.) The poverty rate, when adjusted for the cost of living, is the worst in the nation. California accounts for 12% of the U.S. population, but a quarter of its homeless population.

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Local jurisdictions in California hold enormous sway over what gets built. Officials have often caved to NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) pressure against new development, much of it in the name of protecting the environment or preserving “neighborhood character.”

Parts of the state were downzoned starting in the 1970s, making it harder to build dense urban areas and contributing to racial segregation and sprawl. Three-quarters of the residential land in Los Angeles is restricted to single-family homes, according to UrbanFootprint, software that helps government and businesses understand cities and urban markets. In San Jose, the figure is 94%.

California also has a distinct burden: Proposition 13, a measure approved by voters in 1978 that limits property-tax increases on homes until they’re sold. That’s been a boon for Baby Boomers who’ve lived in their houses for decades and aren’t assessed at anything close to their property’s market value. But it’s especially unfair to their children, who are in effect subsidizing their parents’ generation.

Prop 13 also created a fiscal incentive for many cities to favor new commercial development over residential construction—and heap fees on developers to fund budget gaps.

For decades, many Californians have just moved farther out of town to find cheaper places to live. But as climate change increases the intensity and frequency of wildfires—leading to devastation and billions of dollars in costs—officials may decide to put some areas off-limits for new construction.

 Thomas Fuller at NYT:

The reasons for California’s high costs, developers and housing experts say, begin with the price of land and labor in the state. In San Francisco a construction worker earns around $90 an hour on average, according to Turner & Townsend, a real estate consulting company.

But non-construction costs also weigh heavily.

Not taking into account the price of land, around one quarter of the cost of building affordable housing goes to government fees, permits and consulting companies, according to a 2014 study by the California Department of Housing and Community Development.

For a building to be defined as affordable housing it typically obtains tax credits and subsidies. A single affordable housing project requires financing from an average of six different sources — federal, state and local agencies, said Carolina Reid, a researcher at the Terner Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of a forthcoming analysis of affordable housing costs.

She called the process “death by a thousand cuts.”

 Some cite the California Environmental Quality Act.

California law permits anyone to object to a project under the act, which when it was signed by then Governor Ronald Reagan in 1970 was seen as a landmark effort to protect the environment from reckless development.

Today the law is often used as a legal battle ax by anyone who wants to slow a project down or scuttle it altogether, Mr. Jones and many developers and experts say.

“At very little cost one individual can take a project and tie it up in years of litigation,” said Douglas Abbey, a lecturer on real estate at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

California Drives Out Movie Production

Jen Maffessanti at the Foundation for Economic Education:

In fact, in 2017, only ten of the top 100 movies produced that year were made mostly in California.

It’s no secret that the entire state of California is experiencing a large and sustained out-flow of residents, but Los Angeles County, in particular, is showing the biggest losses. The question is why.

Why is the film industry abandoning its Mount Olympus?...

Sticking with labor costs, California has the second-highest minimum wage in the country at $13 an hour, though that’s set to increase to $15 an hour by 2022. And though there’s still some back-and-forthing going on regarding the notorious AB5 law, many businesses in the state are being told they need to hire their freelancers as (far more expensive) permanent employees.

Not only that, but California’s real estate and housing markets are among the most expensive in the country, a trend that shows no real sign of improving. The state’s zoning and building regulations make innovation difficult. Special preferential political treatment of the California agriculture industry has led to water rationing for individuals during drought conditions.

Take the high costs in California, combine it with fewer people going to the movies, and the result is a shrinking profit margin for production studios.

In fact, drinking water isn’t the only beverage subject to regulation in California. Furthermore, the state’s 2019 kerfuffle with electricity provider PG&E’s rolling blackouts for customers during high winds is also largely a problem created by the meddlesome state government.

Once all of these factors—and the above list is by no means comprehensive—are taken into account, California has the highest poverty rate in the US.

It isn’t that filmmakers don’t want to film in Los Angeles—they do. But all of these combined constraints significantly increase the total costs of filming and producing in California. Heck, not even films set in Los Angeles are being shot in Los Angeles these days.

Production is moving overseas or to states such as Georgia, with generous tax incentives.

The entire state is seeing residents of all kinds leaving. In 2018 alone, the state saw a net loss of about 190,000 residents. That’s slightly more than the entire population of Shreveport, Louisiana. According to a recent UC Berkeley poll, about half of the people still living in California have considered leaving. For Hollywood, history is repeating itself. When asked why, 71 percent cited the high cost of housing and 51 percent said it was because of the high tax burden.

Fake Comments and Federal Agencies

 James V. Grimaldi at WSJ:

Senate investigators found that federal agencies do little or nothing to stop crimes and abuses committed in the systems they use to collect public comments on proposed regulations.

A new bipartisan report, issued Thursday, said the agencies haven’t acted in even the most egregious cases, where real people’s identities, including dead people’s, are stolen and then submitted with comments they never wrote.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report comes after The Wall Street Journal in 2017 exposed thousands of other fraudulent comments on regulatory dockets at federal agencies, some using what appear to be stolen identities posted by computers programmed to pile comments onto the dockets.

Findings of Fact:

Most federal agencies lack appropriate processes to address allegations that people have submitted comments under fraudulent identities. Recent reports demonstrate that individuals are using false identities to submit comments. Agencies, however, lack both the ability to determine if people submit comments under valid identities and appropriate processes to address allegations that fraud or identity theft has occurred. Only one agency contacted by the Subcommittee—the CFTC—said that it had referred suspicious activity to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”). Other agencies, including the CFPB, the Department of Labor, and the FCC, all were aware of comments submitted under false identities regarding their rules, but took little action to address them.

The FCC’s process for addressing comments submitted under false identities potentially causes additional harm to victims of identity theft and the comment process as a whole. The only remedy the FCC provides to people who allege that their identities have been used to post a comment they did not authorize is for the identity theft victims to post a separate comment to establish their own position on an issue. This adds even more comments to often lengthy dockets, making them less useful to the public and to FCC staff. It also requires the victims to engage in a regulatory process in which they potentially have no interest in engaging.

None of the commenting systems use CAPTCHA or other technology to ensure that real people, instead of bots, are submitting comments to rulemaking dockets. This leaves thecommenting process more vulnerable to abuse by malicious actors.

Employment of Military Spouses

Russ Read at The Washington Examiner:

Between 35% and 50% of military spouses work in fields that require occupational licenses or certifications, which are not always recognized when couples move to a new state or country. With the constant moves military life requires, the difficulty drastically increases. Lawyers and teachers are some of the hardest hit, but thanks to the work of advocacy groups across the country, they are seeing some relief from federal and state governments.

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Military spouses are unemployed at four times the rate of civilians, and those seeking employment are unemployed for about four months every time they move. The average military member will move every two to three years, and that lost time and salary can add up significantly over the typical 20-year military career. Even when spouses find jobs, they earn $12,000 less than their civilian colleagues, losing nearly $190,000 over their careers.

Spouses and advocate groups say financial considerations play a major role in whether a service member will continue to serve the country.

Useful Websites

In 2018, the government spent $4.11 trillion. USA Spending tracks federal spending to ensure taxpayers can see how their money is being used in communities across America. Learn more on how this money was spent with tools to help you navigate spending from top to bottom.

The Niskanen Center’s Science of Politics Podcast features up-and-coming researchers delivering fresh insights on the big trends driving American politics and policy today. In 30 minutes, you’ll get beyond punditry to data-driven understanding.  Each episode goes in-depth on one hot topic in the news with two researchers who have just published relevant empirical studies. Hear about their new discoveries and get the broader context that’s lost in the daily news shuffle.

FCC Public Inspection Files

This site provides summary information about, and access to, the “public inspection file” (or “public file”) for the following types of entities: licensed full-service radio and television broadcast stations, Class A television stations, cable television systems, direct broadcast satellite (“DBS”) providers, and satellite radio (also referred to as “Satellite Digital Audio Radio Services” or “SDARS”) licensees.

The Commission first adopted rules requiring broadcast stations to keep a public file more than 40 years ago and certain political programming files have been public for nearly 75 years. The public file for broadcast stations contains a variety of information about each station’s operations and service to its community of license, including information about political time sold or given away by each station, quarterly lists of the most significant programs each station aired concerning issues of importance to its community, data on ownership of each station and active applications each station has filed with the Commission. The Commission adopted the public inspection file requirement to "make information to which the public already has a right more readily available, so that the public will be encouraged to play a more active part in dialogue with broadcast licensees."

Cable, DBS, and SDARS entities also have public and political file requirements. These entities’ political file requirements are substantially similar to those of television and radio broadcasters. Apart from the political file, however, cable, DBS, and SDARS entities’ other public file requirements differ somewhat from the public file

FEC Troubles

Dave Levinthal at the Center for Public Integrity reports on the Federal Election Commission.  An internal turf war has led to a vacancy in its office of inspector general.

The May 2018 fracas, described in interviews and a series of internal emails obtained by the Center for Public Integrity, is but one of several stumbles that have helped render the FEC’s inspector general office effectively nonfunctional since November, when the lone deputy inspector general quit.

This matters because the inspector general office investigates waste, fraud and abuse at the FEC, including accusations against commissioners. The bipartisan FEC is itself responsible for enforcing and regulating national campaign finance laws but has long been hamstrung by ideological divisions, low staff morale and other long-standing vacancies, including two of six FEC commissioner slots.

So the lack of an inspector general means no one is watching the election watchdog — at a time when few feel the FEC is functioning effectively, even as its missions are evermore important. The FEC’s struggles are set against the backdrop of an accelerating chase for presidential campaign cash and prominent political money scandals — alleged porn actress hush-money payments and foreign infiltration among them.

Scammers are also increasingly preying on vulnerable Americans who are misled into believing they are supporting a candidate or cause — an issue the FEC has struggled to address.

Pensions

Lydia DePillis reports at CNN Business:

Traditional pensions are disappearing in America, and the federal government just made it easier for employers to get rid of them.

With no fanfare in early March, the Treasury Department issued a notice that allows employers to buy out current retirees from their pensions with a one-time lump sum payment. The decision reverses Obama-era guidance, issued in 2015, that had effectively banned the practice after officials determined that lump-sum payments often shortchanged seniors.

Now, advocates for the elderly worry that millions of people receiving monthly pension checks could be at risk.

"Permitting plans — for their own financial benefit — to replace joint and survivor or other annuities with lump-sum payments will reduce the retirement security of both workers and their spouses," AARP Legislative Counsel David Certner said. 

Since the 1980s, employers have shifted away from offering defined-benefit pensions, which provide a guaranteed monthly income for as long as someone lives in retirement. Instead,employers now favor 401(k) accounts, a finite pot of money that becomes available at age 59.5.

Pensions, which are insured by the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation in case employers go bankrupt, still cover 26.2 million people across 23,400 single-employer plans. But that number has been shrinking faster than it would naturally as companies close their plans to new hires.

Businesses Seeking Regulation

In his landmark 1971 article, economist George Stigler wrote: “Regulation is acquired by the industry, and is designed and operated primarily for its benefit.”  Occupational licensing is a classic example.

At Axios, Kim Hart provides additional confirmation:

Digital currencies: 2017 ushered in a boom in so-called “initial coin offerings,” but so far the Securities and Exchange Commission has only issued one no-action report and a string of charges against fraudsters.

• The cryptocurrency industry is clamoring for regulators to finally declare what qualifies as securities (among other questions). And it would also like some further guidance from the Internal Revenue Service, which has kept mum since a short 2014 memo, notes Axios' Kia Kokalitcheva.

Online privacy: Early in the Trump administration, Congress overturned the FCC's privacy rules for internet service providers such as AT&T, Verizon, Charter and Comcast. The rules didn't apply to web giants like Google or Facebook, who supported their repeal.

• In the wake of high-profile data scandals and an increased interest in reining in Big Tech's power, policymakers from both parties are revisiting the need for federal privacy rules. This time, the telecom and tech companies are on board with rules — partly because they're inevitable, and partly to pre-empt state regulations are are cropping up all over the country.

Financial advisers: Brokerage firms want more clarity about an Obama-era fiduciary rule that was overturned this year. The rule required financial advisers to work in their client's best interest — and not push products with higher fees, even if they produce less-than-stellar returns.

• But firms have already shifted investment products and altered structures of broker fees in preparation for the regulation's full implementation. The question is what's coming back and when. The SEC has since taken up the issue, proposed "Regulation Best Interest" and put it high on its 2019 agenda, Axios' Courtenay Brown reports.

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The bottom line: Companies may feel safer handing government the hot potato of figuring out where to draw lines around potentially controversial technologies to help limit their own liabilities. But government may not be inclined to limit its own freedom to use the new tools, as may be the case with facial recognition and drones, notes Axios' Ina Fried.

The NRA and the Gun Lobby

Nicholas Kristof at The New York Times:

"The NRA appears to have evolved into the lobby for gun and ammunition manufacturers rather than gun owners,” Adolphus Busch IV, of the Anheuser Busch beer fortune, wrote in a 2013 letterresigning his life membership in the N.R.A. “Your current strategic focus places a priority on the needs of gun and ammunition manufacturers while disregarding the opinions of your 4 million individual members. One only has to look at the makeup of the 75-member board of directors, dominated by manufacturing interests, to confirm my point.”

The backdrop is several challenges faced by the gun industry. It is a mature business whose products last generations, and whose traditional constituency — hunters — is aging and shrinking, and it is also facing the kind of liability risks that struck the tobacco industry. Yet in fact, the gun industry has prospered in recent decades — in large part because it has been rescued by N.R.A. fear-mongering that drives gun owners to buy more weapons and accessories before they’re banned. This is brilliant marketing.

NRA is campaigning to allow silencers, arguing that they reduce the hearing loss associated with gunfire.

No one takes this public health argument seriously, but allowing silencers would be a huge boon for the gun industry. If five million Americans each bought a silencer for two firearms, it could amount to $1 billion in sales.

Moreover, most firearms today don’t have the threaded barrels needed to accommodate a silencer. So a gun owner who wanted both a rifle and a handgun with silencers would also buy two more firearms — a further benefit to the industry.

“The N.R.A. has policy positions and rhetorical positions that are aligned with where the gun industry makes its money,” notes J. Adam Skaggs of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

Still, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the gun industry has hijacked the N.R.A. Mike Weisser, a gun store owner and frequent writer about gun policy, argues persuasively that it goes too far to say that the N.R.A. is controlled by gun manufacturers; he says that the gun industry and the N.R.A. work together not out of a nefarious conspiracy but because together they can maximize both N.R.A. influence and industry revenue.

Fake Comments

At The Wall Street Journal, James V. Grimaldi reports that the attorney general of New York State has subpoenaed more than a dozen consultants and outside lobbying firms as part of an investigation into fake comments filed with the FCC over net neutrality.

The civil subpoenas are aimed at determining who was behind millions of comments sent using the names of real people who didn’t authorize them, according to a person familiar with the investigation. New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood said in a statement that her office found up to 9.5 million comments that appear to have been filed using the names and addresses of real people who had no idea they were being cited in the comments.

An investigation by The Wall Street Journal last year found thousands of people who said their names were used without their permission to post comments about FCC rules.

The attorney general’s yearlong investigation is targeting fake comments filed on both sides of the issue. Among the entities subpoenaed are Broadband for America, a group backed by AT&T Inc. and other internet-service providers who sought the repeal of the Obama-era internet rules known as net neutrality, as well as consumer groups that supported the Obama rules, such as Fight for the Future and Free Press.

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The attorney general also subpoenaed the Center for Individual Freedom, an Alexandria, Va.-based group that supported Mr. Pai’s repeal of the rules and drafted one of the most frequently cited comments posted on the FCC website: a complaint about the “unprecedented regulatory power the Obama administration.”

The Journal investigation reached 1,994 of the people registered by the FCC as having filed that comment; 72% of them said the comment was falsely submitted.

Americans Are More Skeptical of Regulation than Europeans

Laura Silver at Pew:

People across Western Europe generally believe it is good for society if the government regulates business. In the eight countries surveyed late last year, a median of 57% said this is good, with the publics in Spain (72%) and the UK (68%) especially positive about government regulation of business. Last summer, Americans were divided on whether government regulation of business is necessary to protect the public interest (50%) or usually does more harm than good (45%).

Federalism in Action, Mid-2018

Madison wrote in Federalist 51:

In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people. The different governments will control each other, at the same time that each will be controlled by itself.

Supporters of business regulation are rediscovering federalism.

Jon Marcus at The Hechinger Report:

But it wasn’t the Education Department that shut down the Charlotte School of Law days before it was scheduled to open this past fall. It was North Carolina’s attorney general. And when the department sought to limit the number of the law school’s students eligible to have their loans forgiven, the attorney general intervened again.

The case is among a slew of enforcement actions, lawsuits and legislative proposals through which states are cracking down on for-profit colleges and universities and loan-servicing companies they say cheat or mislead students. And the trend is picking up momentum as the Trump administration and Congress seek to soften federal regulations that were beefed up during the Obama years.

Steven Musil at CNET:

 Leading California lawmakers said Thursday they have reached an agreement on legislation that will create super-strong net neutrality protections after the Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal its own regulations.

The deal comes after bitter debate among Democrats over how much muscle to put into the legislation, heralded as one of the nation's most aggressive efforts to revive Obama-era net neutrality regulations reversed by the Trump administration.

The bill's author, state Sen. Scott Wiener, said in June that he and fellow Democrat Assemblyman Miguel Santiago would begin negotiating to fix the bill to ensure the protections that were weeded out in the committee process would be added back into the legislation.

"For months, we have worked with a broad coalition to pass strong and enforceable net neutrality protections," Weiner, a Democrat from San Francisco, said in a statement Thursday. "As internet service providers and media companies like AT&T and Time Warner consolidate, net neutrality is more important than ever."

Free Speech, Fake News, and the Internet

From Pew:

When asked to choose between the U.S. government taking action to restrict false news online in ways that could also limit Americans’ information freedoms, or protecting those freedoms even if it means false information might be published, Americans fall firmly on the side of protecting freedom. Nearly six-in-ten Americans (58%) say they prefer to protect the public’s freedom to access and publish information online, including on social media, even if it means false information can also be published. Roughly four-in-ten (39%) fall the other way, preferring that the U.S. government take steps to restrict false information even if it limits those freedoms, according to a survey conducted Feb. 26-March 11, 2018, among 4,734 U.S. adults who are members of Pew Research Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel.

When the same question is posed about technology companies taking those steps, however, the balance changes. More U.S. adults (56%) favor technology companies taking steps to restrict false information, even if it limits the public’s freedom to access and publish information. By comparison, 42% prefer to protect those freedoms rather than have tech companies take action, even if it means the presence of some misinformation online.

Trump v. Amazon

Mike Allen at Axios:

What we're hearing: Trump has talked about changing Amazon’s tax treatment because he’s worried about mom-and-pop retailers being put out of business.

• A source who’s spoken to POTUS: “He’s wondered aloud if there may be any way to go after Amazon with antitrust or competition law."
• Trump’s deep-seated antipathy toward Amazon surfaces when discussing tax policy and antitrust cases. The president would love to clip CEO Jeff Bezos’ wings. But he doesn’t have a plan to make that happen.

Behind the president's thinking: Trump's wealthy friends tell him Amazon is destroying their businesses. His real estate buddies tell him — and he agrees — that Amazon is killing shopping malls and brick-and-mortar retailers.

• Trump tells people Amazon has gotten a free ride from taxpayers and cushy treatment from the U.S. Postal Service.
• “The whole post office thing, that's very much a perception he has,” another source said. “It's been explained to him in multiple meetings that his perception is inaccurate and that the post office actually makes a ton of money from Amazon."
• Axios' Ina Fried notes: The post office actually added delivery on Sunday in some cities because Amazon made it worthwhile.
• Trump also pays close attention to the Amazon founder's ownership of The Washington Post, which the president views as Bezos’ political weapon.

I have stated my concerns with Amazon long before the Election. Unlike others, they pay little or no taxes to state & local governments, use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.), and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 29, 2018

Costs, Benefits, and Regulations

Charles S. Clark at Government Executive:

In stark contrast to the Trump administration’s denunciations of red tape over the past year, the White House late Friday published a mandatory summary of the overall costs and benefits of regulations—showing that governmentwide, the benefits far outweighed the costs.

The draft report from the Office of Management and Budget is required annually under the 2000 Regulatory Right to Know Act. It estimated annual monetized benefits of major federal regulations from Oct. 1, 2006, to Sept. 30, 2016, are in the aggregate between $219 billion and $695 billion. In contrast, the estimated annual costs are in the aggregate between $59 billion and $88 billion (reported in 2001 dollars).

Cautioning that the estimates are rough and vary by agency, the report restated the balance favoring benefits over costs in 2015 dollars, putting benefits at between $287 billion and $911 billion, and costs between $78 billion and $115 billion.

That contrasts sharply with the positions taken by Neomi Rao,administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, who stresses the burdens and costs of Obama administration rules.

Inflation

Mark J. Perry at AEI compares inflation rates for various good and services.  Textbooks and tuition, alas, are near the very top.

The chart above (thanks to Olivier Ballou) is an update of a chart we produced last year about this time, and shows the percent changes since January 1997 in the prices of selected consumer goods and services, along with the increase in average hourly earnings in this version (which have increased by 81.5% over the last 21 years vs. the 55.6% increase in the CPI).

See any patterns? Tradeables (with import competition like TVs) vs. non-tradeables (like childcare), manufactured goods (with import competition like clothing and cars) vs. services (medical, hospitals, education), competitive (software) vs. protected industries (healthcare), degree of government involvement/funding/regulation?

Here are some comments from Twitter about the chart, which I posted there a few days ago and which has been re-Tweeted more than 200 times.

Blue lines = prices subject to free market forces. Red lines = prices subject to regulatory capture by government. Food and drink is debatable either way. Conclusion: remind me why socialism is so great again.