Reducing Red Tape Is Great but It Won’t Solve Jobs Problem: View

To hear some Republicans tell it, the U.S. is stuck in a morass of stubbornly high unemployment for one reason: an unprecedented and vastly burdensome increase in government regulation under President Barack Obama.

This sounds plausible -- what business owner hasn’t felt that government rules impose undue costs? But as a Bloomberg Government analysis showed on Oct. 25, it’s exaggerated. Obama’s White House has approved 4.7 percent fewer regulations than his predecessor at the same point in their administrations. Although the average annual costs of regulation for businesses have risen somewhat under Obama, they aren’t unusually high by historical standards.