Bush's heavy (regulatory) hand

Somehow, as I've noted before, people continue to imagine that Bush is laissez-faire. Here's Veronique de Rugy in Reason comparing Bush with Nixon on economic intervention...

When Barack Obama was running for president, he made no secret about his plan to "restore common-sense regulation"—read: increase regulation—by closing the regulatory loopholes he thought the Republicans had opened. Deregulation, he argued repeatedly, is the source of evil....Obama offered a sweeping, ambitious agenda: new financial regulations, new labor regulations, new energy regulations, and more....

And unlike FDR before him, President Obama won't have to create a regulatory system from scratch in order to increase government control of people's lives. His groundwork was laid by George W. Bush.

Some people still seem to think Republicans take a hands-off approach to regulation, probably because the party is always quick to criticize the burdens regulations place on businesses. But Republican rhetoric doesn't always match Republican policy....

Since Bush took office in 2001, there has been a 13 percent decrease in the annual number of new rules. But the new regulations' cost to the economy will be much higher than it was before 2001. Of the new rules, 159 are "economically significant," meaning they will cost at least $100 million a year. That's a 10 percent increase in the number of high-cost rules since 2006, and a 70 percent increase since 2001....The number of pages added to the Federal Register, which lists all new regulations, reached an all-time high of 78,090 in 2007, up from 64,438 in 2001....

President Bush deserves most of the blame for this regulatory expansion. While the president does not have to sign new rules before they're implemented, he does implicitly approve them. In addition, he signed hundreds of laws commanding federal agencies to produce new regulations. One is the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002...Another is the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law...

The Bush team has spent more taxpayer money on issuing and enforcing regulations than any previous administration in U.S. history. Between fiscal year 2001 and fiscal year 2009, outlays on regulatory activities, adjusted for inflation, increased from $26.4 billion to an estimated $42.7 billion, or 62 percent. By contrast, President Clinton increased real spending on regulatory activities by 31 percent, from $20.1 billion in 1993 to $26.4 billion in 2001....

It takes a lot of bureaucrats to create and enforce all those regulations. In eight years, Bush increased the federal government's regulatory staff by 91,196 employees. Clinton cut it by 969. This is why Business Week recently designated Washington as one of the top places to ride out the recession: The government is hiring....