Sep
27
The Effects Of Regulation
Filed Under American Politics
HotAir have the details of a report conducted into the effects of regulation on the disastrous Californian economy:
This study measures and reports the cost of regulation to small business in the State of California. It uses original analyses and a general equilibrium framework to identify and measure the cost of regulation as measured by the loss of economic output to the State’s gross product, after controlling for variables known to influence output. It also measures second order costs resulting from regulatory activity by studying the total impact – direct, indirect, and induced. The study finds that the total cost of regulation to the State of California is $492.994 billion which is almost five times the State’s general fund budget, and almost a third of the State’s gross product. The cost of regulation results in an employment loss of 3.8 million jobs which is a tenth of the State’s population. Since small business constitute 99.2% of all employer businesses in California, and all of non-employer business, the regulatory cost is borne almost completely by small business. The total cost of regulation was $134,122.48 per small business in California in 2007, labor income not created or lost was $4,359.55 per small business, indirect business taxes not generated or lost were $57,260.15 per small business, and finally roughly one job lost per small business.
Barack Obama and the Democrats are trying to increase the amount of regulation in the economy, through Cap and Trade and Health Care reform. The dysfunctional California should provide a stark warning as to the effects of such measures.
It could be argued however that California restricts itself economically by making it harder to raise taxes to compensate for economic problems. A two-thirds majority is required to pass a budget in the State House, and Proposition 13 limits the amount of property taxes that can be raised. But Obama has done that too himself to with his promise to not raise taxes on the middle classes.
An overly regulated economy and self-imposed taxation restrictions do not point to strong economic recovery. Small businesses in America provide the dynamism that fuels economic growth and they are the ones best placed to react quicker to increases or decreases in regulation.
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40 Responses to “The Effects Of Regulation”
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California is committing suicide. And the Pelosi/Fienstein axis would like to extend it to all of the USA bfore anybody notices.
Politicians love to impose regulations. That’s what they do. While one would not wish to take away their constitutional role, it would be nice if there was a little more responsibility on them to study the likely effects.
No word on here about the central valley fish vs water dispute. How do the blog’s dems side on that one? I was there a couple of weeks back (yes, in the valley where the farms are, not the SF/LA axis) and saw a sign over a dead orchard saying ‘Congress created Dust Bowl’.
I agree Rhoda.
Too often legislation is enacted without any thought given to likely economic consequencies.
One more result of the advent of the professional career politician with zero experience of business in the real world.
So, Cabbie. Now you want to raise taxes for the middle class?
The problem in CA is politicians who spend too much and interfere too much. Giving the more tax money whatever the source is to enable them. What is needed is for governemnt to restrain itself. I won’t be holding my breath. Meanwhile CA is killing itself. How do they think corporation who can move will not go to a nearby state tempting them with better conditions? How do they think they will encourage people to start new business?
Is it unrestrained government hubris which will lead to the end of the road for the dem bandwagon? Probably. Now, for those of a dem persuasion, this is NOT a partisan point. America cannot work if the government has no restraint in the way it interferes in every aspect of life, and treats tax money as if it came from a tap. The republicans have not been innocent here either, don’t bother to post your examples. Unrestrained government is wrong whoever does it.
Because the dems now are the ones in government, it is they who must impose restraint. In CA, in the USA. There is no alternative, except disaster.
The water problems of California farmers is hardly that simplistic.
1992 George H.W. Bush signed the
Miller-Bradley bill after promising he would veto it…It passed the Senate with 83-8 support. Hardly just a Democratic issue.
That bill set aside 1.2 million acre-feet of CVP water, a significant loss, but hardly done by just one party.
The Endangered Species Act did further damage but the GOP made no move to change that Act’s provision when they had the power.
They are legalizing pot though
I didn’t say a party did it. Again with the partisan stuff. Farmers are (claimed to be) starving, it put 40,000 out of work (allegedly) and it’s to save a stupid fish. Now was it right or wrong? If it is wrong, should it be fixed? Or do we need to fix CA’s century-old water problem as a whole, somehow?
The pot legalization is a cowardly fudge. Medicinal my arse. Local magazines are full of ads for ‘doctors’ who will prescribe it for you. Camel, nose,tent.
Its a heck of a lot more complicated than Man v Fish.
It’s the cumulative effects of long term decisions.
In order to fix California’s water problem you would need to engage Oregon, Washington, Colorado, etc., etc..
I’m not going to dismiss California’s problems, though problems will occur during times of drought. Its a fact of business.
Central Washington dealt with this same problem several years ago..rationing of irrigation water due to drought. Many orchardists had to make a decision regarding what would produce and what would be set aside until more water was available. California certainly didn’t say “Okay, keep some of our water during this time of trouble”.
California’s problems need to be solved, but the solution isn’t going to happen until the farmers look at real world solutions…including conservation, more reservoirs, etc..
These guys are a giant sucking sound to the West..and it never stops.
Rhoda
yep I know when I was in LA over the summer the papers were full of ad’s for Doctors giving a “sympathetic hearing” for medical pot.
The Times was saying this morning that they are going remove the fudge and legalize and tax it.
OK, I’ll agree that California water is just one more example of them not really wanting to live with the world as it is. I understand that some farmers pay $1 per acre-foot. They seem to have little chance of ever building another dam or reservoir, there’ll be some stupid fish, owl, newt or whatever that would be disturbed. I wouldn’t even suggest my plan of nuclear power running desalination during the night and as a by-product of cooling, although it would solve their self-inflicted power problem too.
You know that is a perfect question for me to ask my husband and our house guest who is arriving this evening.
Is your suggestion reasonable. I do remember him referring to the cost per gallon of water on a nuclear submarine being pretty high…but a good question.
I thought that CA led the world in innovation and yet it seems unable, or unwilling, to apply that lead to solving its own problems.
By all accounts, there will be severe water shortages throughout the world and I would see creating lasting solutions to this looming crisis as a huge commercial opportunity.
Rhoda
You see reading the National Geographic does have it’s uses
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/02/drying-west/kunzig-text
It seems the Western US was colonised during a period of unusually high rain fall and now we’re coming down the other side.
I drove over the Hoover Dam in the summer and Lake Mead is very-very low.
As far as I understand, desalination costs a lot. But if you have a nuke anyway, you might as well run it at night (or when the grid doesn’t need the power) to desalinate. You still need to pay for the extra plant, of course. It proably costs even more on a sub because there is no space. I see it as using a modified cooling tower system to condense off the water vapour. Takes a big volume. But then I’m not an expert. I’ve seen that desalinated water is $1000 per acre-foot. But then the prices currently paid in CA are not realistic anyway. There’s just too much historic baggage, not least of which is that some farms will become uneconomic, and the country needs them (to support migrant mexicans?) and their produce.
Sitting in the UK watching TV and movies one has no idea of the size of rural CA, or how much is grown there. There’s only SF and LA, isn’t there?
Rhoda.
‘Sitting in the UK watching TV and movies one has no idea of the size of rural CA, or how much is grown there. There’s only SF and LA, isn’t there?’
But some of us have read Steinbeck.
Yes, I’d read him too, but it seems not to have had the effect of thousands of movies and TV shows. Just opened my credit card bill for the holiday. 29th August, Cannery Row. 1st Sep, Napa Valley, tasting grapes of wrath.
I’ve been a wildlife conservationist for decades now and see how most conservationists think. They put everything before mankind. In fact, some of the leftys, which comprise most of the conservation groups, would be more than happy to see no humans…just wildlife living on the earth with just a few of them, of course, left to enjoy earth’s eden.
I had breakfast with a well known conservationist that wanted the the Feds to take all of the ranches and do away with all beef cattle…she was a vegan, of course. I was shocked and voiced that and she smugly sat there and defended her ideas…these people are politically dangerous and they seem to be getting their way. California is a prime example.
The California Delta Smelt will survive without shutting off the volume of water that the conservationists have enacted. They tried to do the same thing with a tiny fish on the Rio Grande…Mother Nature takes care of its own…in drought years, some of the fish seem to survive in small pools. Then populated in wetter years…
Right now, it is that simple. They need to turn the spigots on for the farmers…all of the nitty gritty things can be worked out later. Ten of thousands of acres of Nut trees are dying or have died and the topsoil is blowing away.
Some are saying that some farmers sold their water rights and thats why their fields are dying…I don’t know all of the particulars…but I’m sure laws can be passed to stop that.
Rhoda is right, the politicans are killing, literally killing California, Oregon and Washinging…it’s conservation gone wild by a handful of liberal hippies.
We need to shut down Congress for about a decade or two…undo 90% of the damage they have wreaked on this country…That would take care of the problem.
Ronnie,
California is where we are all heading under this administration…plain and simple.
This is Liberalism in action…in a nutshell.
And when it implodes, the Feds will step in and give it trillions of our tax money to keep it limping along. And they will continue to go down the same road…
Most Americans think of California as one big nasty carbuckle on the backside of the US.
AA
Thought you might like this:
Black bears raid homes of the wealthy in Aspen after berry shortage
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6851614.ece
Too much rain this time
PS Thought you might like this- Not the bears being shot bit
AA
Most Americans live in California or want to and so would I if I could, the greatest state in the Union.
AA…being the “religious nut” among us, you will come to know that a lot of ‘liberal hippies’ are into Earth Worship. I mean this literally. They worship earth as a living entity. They call it Gaia and they worship it like a living being. Gaia means mother, mother earth.
These are no liberal hippies, they are religious freaks!!!!
OT You meed to read Lovelock It’s not hippie shit it’s hard science
Lovelock is not hard science. It’s more of a speculation than a theory, and no-one who was, for example, an evolutionist, could rate it as more than a concept, an interesting way of looking at things, but basically more romance than science. It’s like a branch of intelligent design, but with Gaia where God used to be.
THX,
Thanks for the article.
Yes, this is what I do with my BearWatch group…put out information on what not to do…to keep bears away from your home. We also work closely with the New Mexico Game and Fish and have been able to change hunting laws, the number of bears that can be killed by hunters annually, stopping the spring hunt and summer dog training using bears, etc.
We visited Aspen several years ago to look at their bearproofing and most of the town’s businesses are bearproofed but it comes down to the homeowners and that is hardest thing to get across to people…that once a bear is habitutated to human food, it will keep coming back into the neighborhood. We’re dealing with really intelligent animals.
We’ve had a good year here, with little bear-human activity…and hibernation will start for the sows with cubs by Oct. 15 with older bears going into their dens by mid November.
We’re not anti-hunting, but we do try to get our Game and Fish to manage better for the future of the species. And again, try to get people to learn to co-exist with these animals. Aspen has so far killed about 40 bears…so the article is fudging on the numbers.
You notice in the photo…all the birdfeeders available for that young bear. I only hope that homeowners was fined big time…because that is a ruined bear. I actually encouraged our Game and Fish to destroy a bear in front of some homeowners…instead of taking it away to kill it. Boy, people had a fit and there were newspapers and TV stories about this young bear…but you know what, it made an impression on these homeowners and that large housing developement…that poor bear did not die in vain.
Very few people call G&F anymore, they deal with the problem, which is what we want them to do.
THX,
California is overpopulated and the last time I was on one of their freeways, I had a small panic attack…I thought this is what the end of the world is going to be like…One Big LA. I told my husband…I will follow you anywhere, but not to LA!
But, I do love the San Fran area and of course the northern coastal area is gorgeous…but the politicians are ruining it…just ruining it which is a terrible shame.
O. Tony,
I know…we just had about 30,000 of these Earth Worshippers descend on the nearby Jemez Mountains this summer. It’s just an excuse to try every drug out there and have orgies…and they left tens of thousands of tons of trash for the Park Service to clean up behind them. The liberal do-gooders were there too innoculating them for all of their many diseases and treating over-doses… So much for worshipping mother earth..huh?
I know a wildlife biologist that actually belongs to one of these cults, and he calls it a religion…and he was raised in California…go figure.
Hopefully, they will all go to some other state next year.
AA
Thanks for such a detailed reply on the bears, fascinating
Rhoda You’re wrong about Lovelock but I would agree that Gaia is an unfortunate name.
Interesting.
When my husband retired from the Navy he was offered a position in Los Angeles and I asked him if he was going to commute.
I’ll go anywhere, and have, but the only line I draw is Los Angeles.
Wrong? I’ll admit I haven’t read it, but I’ve seen it summarised as a hypothesis whereby the earth, the planet and/or the biosphere, somehow works in a co-operative way to repair itself and absorb damage done to it, presumably by evil humankind. If so, what status quo does it work to achieve? In all the geological times, ice ages, snowball earth, the time when there was no ice and the water came up to here- ..massive differences, only one Gaia? What is he trying to say other than that things swing one way, then swing back, usually. Got that, then what is the value of the rest of it? I’d accept it other than for the tiny problem of the way it offends against logic and observation. Same reason why I’m an atheist. What about you?
Rhoda
First of all another atheist- Hurrah
Gaia is the idea that the Earth works as a self regulating closed system actually I think that amongst atmospheric scientists It’s pretty much accepted now and Gaia has just been upgraded from a Gaia Hypothesis to Gaia Theory although I know Dawkins has issues.
I have only read The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning & The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back – and How We Can Still Save Humanity
Lovelock is no greenie but he is a worried man
Earth is not a closed system, the effect of sunlight (not to mention magnetic fields and charged aprticles from solar flares and so on) varies on a decadal basis and on a geological scale. It isn’t really cyclical, but it goes up and down.
It has volcanoes, which means the biosphere itself is not closed off from massive injections of matter and heat which is effectively external, unless you think there is feedback form the surface or oceans to whatever goes on underneath the crust.
And it doesn’t self-regulate, because there is no correct state. Actual states of the earth have varied immensely over geological time. And humanity is dwarfed by the scale of the whole thing. We really are not big enough or powerful enough to make any difference.
Conan Doyle postulated that the earth was an organism in one of the Challenger stories (of which the best known is of course the Lost World).
Anyway, a scientific answer would be that for it to be even a hypothesis, it has to be falsifiable. That means, what observation or experiment might we do to prove it false? If we cannot formulate one, it ain’t science, nor may it be promoted to a theory. Which incidentally is why AGW is still a hypothesis at best.
Rhoda
How do I know I’m not scientist but he is very convincing in his books.
My understanding was that Gaia and AGW were theories because they both make predictions that have been borne out.
No THX, it’s a principle of science that it doesn’t matter how much evidence accrues to support a hypothise, it only takes one fact to refute it. That’s why the test is falsifiability. And why any hypothesis must have a test of falsifiability, or it is a mere matter of faith, never mind how many observations support it.
No THX, it’s a principle of science that it doesn’t matter how much evidence accrues to support a hypothise, it only takes one fact to refute it.
Agreed but they must also make predictions that are accurate and my understanding is that Gaia does this.
It’s clear that the science isn’t in…to justify what Gore and company are trying to sell. This ‘global warming’ is more closely aligned to a religion than science.
My husband is a scientist who has signed onto a list of approximately 30,000 other scientists that don’t believe the global warmers have proven anything. That doesn’t mean that man couldn’t possibly have some negative affect on the environment. But everything the ‘warmers’ have put forward scientifically leaks like a sieve. He’s also a Fellow of the American Physical Society and also signed along with 500 other Fellows their view that this global warming is most probably natural and has little to do with man. In fact, some science shows that we are going into a cooling of the environment…a mini ice age, that should last for many decades.
But, let’s not listen to the ‘real’ scientists…by the way, most of the scientists that signed onto Gore’s project were what we call soft science…like psychologists and physicians…Let’s listen to Gore and buy his ‘invisible kook’ Carbon Credits so he can keep flying worldwide in his private plane and make a couple of billion for himself on this gigantic fraud. I wonder if Gore’s plane has a padded cell for his bad days…
AA
“30,000 other scientists that don’t believe the global warmers have proven anything”
Oh Dear you can do better than that, so easy to debunk that it’s hardly worth bothering
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P8mlF8KT6I&feature=player_profilepage#t=35
But here we go anyway.
THX
There is no scientific proof that global warming is caused by man…none. That’s not to say that there isn’t some warming going on…but it is slight and most likely cyclical. We are now facing a cooling period which will probably cause bigger problems for crops, etc.
AA
“We are now facing a cooling period”
No we aren’t 1988 and all that
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwnrpwctIh4
You need to drop your ideological issues with AGW and get real with science.
There was a falsifiable aspect to AGW. The theory as posted demands that any temperature effect seen at ground level will be a fraction of that seen in the troposphere. Neither satellite observations nor weather balloons have ever shown the expected rise up there. The respnse of AGW theorists was to distrust the evidence and propose a way of measuring temps at height NOT BY THE THERMOMETERS carried by the balloons, but by some complicated linkage between temp and wind speed, which gives the result they want despite being unsupported by anyone else.
The climate disaster part of AGW theory relies on the admitted warming effect of CO2 being amplified three times by what is known as positive water vapour feedback. There is no observation of that feedback in real life, but there are some (eeer-reviewed) papers which show it to be negative, tending to reduce not amplify the CO2 warming.
The AGW people are supposed to prove their hypothesis, coming up with supporting data and falsifiability tests which can be performed using real world observations or data, not models. It doesn’t matter how many scientists are on each side.