Dakota Beacon

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Washington itself causes much of the high unemployment in America by its excessive regulations that stymie industry and new investments, according to Jon Basil Utley in a new article, "Confronting Washington's Job Killers" at Reason.com. Utley is the associate publisher of The American Conservative magazine, formerly was a commentator for Voice of America, and a foreign correspondent for Knight Ridder for many years in South America.

 

 "An economic crisis with high unemployment is the best time to confront and even possibly reform Washington's job-killing laws," Utley explains.  "Most Americans are either uninformed about the quantity and consequences of these laws or they regard them as normal."

 

The author cites the example of the Environmental Protection Agency prohibiting for over a month the use of   Dutch oil skimmer technology and ships during the recent spill in the Gulf of Mexico because the cleaned up and then discharged ocean water would not be 99.998% pure. He blames "extremism and vicious fines and penalties" coming from the EPA as "a primary reason why America is falling behind much of the world."

 

Utley, who previously operated a Pennsylvania oil drilling partnership, lists nine ways to immediately create more jobs. He suggests some of the following reforms:

 

-- Identify and modify the excessive and job-destroying EPA regulations.

 

-- Revise depreciation schedules. American real estate companies, for example, must depreciate new roofs or boilers over 27 years. Lowering such rates to 5 years would instigate enormous new activity for the building trades.

 

-- The public sector has billions of state funds that could be redirected from exorbitant pension and health benefit packages to hiring and construction.

 

-- "Stop fighting endless foreign wars. Just think if the trillion dollars spent on Iraq had been used to rebuild our infrastructure. China, for example, is using its money to build massive new highways and high-speed rail between every major city. Meanwhile, it costs us 250,000 bullets for each dead guerrilla, and $45 per gallon of fuel landed in Afghanistan. Little of this spending creates jobs in America."

 

-- "Stop passing vague laws. The new bank reform act, for instance, is expected to make small business loans harder to get and put new burdens on small banks. Among other restrictions, it requires bankers to verify that a loan is 'suitable' for a given customer. That sort of vague language will inspire lawsuits, which in turn will result in the banks denying future loans."

 

-- "Make cheap electricity accessible. Government regulations (and regulation-inspired lawsuits) now prohibit or delay the building of new coal-generated plants as well as nuclear plants."

 

-- "Lift the ban on deep water offshore drilling. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of highly paid blue-collar jobs are in peril-or are simply not initiated-because of investors' fears of arbitrary government regulations."

 

-- "Reform health care by promoting price competition and curtailing spurious lawsuits. Wasteful and expensive health care is a tremendous burden on American business, pushing up labor costs beyond the rates of even Western Europe, where withholding taxes include health insurance.

 

 -- "Stop subsidizing ethanol, solar, and wind power. The billions wasted here could be used for real investments to expand America's economy and re-build our decaying infrastructure."

These suggestions "are just a few ways in which millions of new jobs could be created. Sparking debate on these issues is the way to create real jobs, reduce government deficits, and bring prosperity back to America," Utley concludes.

 

See the full article at http://reason.com/archives/2010/08/13/confronting-washingtons-job-ki