Biden’s latest plan to drive prices even higher
by Washington Examiner
November 18, 2023 07:15 AM
The rate at which prices are rising has slowed somewhat, but prices are still going up. The vast majority of the public is unhappy about it and expects things to get worse.
And as long as President Joe Biden is in office, that is a reasonable expectation, for Biden’s Office of Management and Budget pushed through new regulations this month that will make it easier for every federal agency to raise the regulatory costs of everything people want to do.
At issue is the discount rate that the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs uses when calculating costs and benefits of proposed regulation. These analyses are not required by statute, but the White House has performed them since President Ronald Reagan issued an executive order mandating them in 1981. Presidents from both parties have since embraced Reagan’s requirement, although each president has tweaked the process in one way or another.
Biden’s new twist to the formula would cook the books in favor of costly new regulations. Regulators face many uncertainties when calculating the costs and benefits of regulation, including balancing the trade-offs between higher costs now and benefits decades in the future.
Let’s say the Biden administration is considering new energy efficiency standards that will drive up the costs of dishwashers today. When balancing those real costs that consumers will feel today against the benefits of lower energy consumption in the future, how much weight should regulators put on each side of the scale?
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