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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (129937)	2/1/2010 9:20:24 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542571

Benen used the word "committed" to characterize the degree to which Reagan, GHWB, and GWB wished to hamper the regulatory role of the federal government But they didn't hamper the regulatory role of the government, except maybe Reagan and to the extent he did, it was mostly to remove some really foolish regulations. Maybe they where mentally cimmuted to it, or at least paid lip service to it, but the two Bush's didn't follow through on any statements or thoughts they had along the lines that Benen presented. in their budget allocations The budgets increased greatly in real terms since Reagan took office, whether or not you drop out Clinton so as to focus only on the "three Republican predecessors", while the power and impact and intrusiveness of all these regulations increased. The whole "Republicans pushed through dangerous deregulation" theme is nonsense. Even the "Republicans did a lousy job of regulation compared to the Democrats" theme is really weak and unsupported. (Although if you drop the "compared to Democrats", than I might agree.) But that's a different argument than the one you chose, the sheer number of regulations. I'm not sure I mentioned the number of regulations at all in this conversation. If I did it wasn't a major point. My point is the power, impact, and intrusiveness of regulations. The regulations caused more change, impacted on more people, cost more to comply with, covered more things... None of that is about the number of the regulations. Of course the number of regulations also increased, and I've talked about that before, but that wasn't the argument I chose in the post you where recently responding to.