The Cost-Benefit Boomerang

Everyone in communications knows how to bury a news story: release it late on a Friday. So it was with the White House's annual report on federal regulations, released months behind schedule on a Friday in February. As it has for many years, the report pegged the benefits of federal regulation in the hundreds of billions of dollars, swamping the calculated costs of compliance by at least 2 to 1 and possibly as much as 12 to 1 - awkward results for the Trump communications team, to say the least. How to square these numbers with the "job-killing regulations" trope was a real head-scratcher. It might seem like good news that regulatory safeguards actually do save a lot of lives, not to mention preventing a lot of diseases, accidents, and other bad things. But these big numbers on the benefits of federal regulations are driving the right wing crazy. Industry lawyers and lobbyists along with their allies at right-wing think tanks have been hard at work trying to discredit them for years now. The irony is that these are the same people who tried to sell us on the notion that government regulations should be subject to a cost-benefit test to begin with.