Photograph by Mladen Antonov/AFP via Getty Images

A cardboard cut-out of President Barack Obama in a tent defending “Obamacare” at a street fair in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The 2010 health-care law that’s expected to expand insurance coverage to 27 million Americans in the next decade isn’t cheap: About $1.2 trillion through 2022.

There’s another cost, less well known: The time Americans will spend complying with the law and its requirements. And that figure may be even more jaw-dropping: About 127.6 million man-hours per year and counting, according to the House Ways and Means Committee.

The committee — chaired by Michigan Republican Dave Camp, no fan of President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act — unveiled today what it calls the “Obama-care Burden Tracker.” The online tool relies on data produced by the Obama administration itself as it writes regulations implementing the health law.

Under a law called the Paperwork Reduction Act, federal agencies have to calculate how much time the nation’s citizenry will spend complying with their regulations. The burden is reported in hours as part of regulatory filings, and is summed up in a report from the White House Office of Management and Budget each year.

In 2011, for example, Americans spent about 9.1 billion hours on federal paperwork, according to the most recent report. In that context, the health-care law will only increase the public’s bureaucratic burden by about 14 percent.

“With many rules and regulations yet to come, these 127 million burden hours — many of them due to complying with new taxes — are just the tip of the iceberg,” Camp said in a statement.

Some of the burden, though, is voluntary.

For example, the most burdensome regulation yet issued under the 2010 health-care law relates to an optional tax credit available to small businesses that insure their workers. Complying with those rules alone would cost Americans about 40 million hours a year, the Obama administration says; perhaps an indication why many small businesses aren’t bothering.

A spokeswoman for the White House budget office, asked about the Ways and Means burden tracker, didn’t dispute Camp’s math. She noted that Obama has repealed some of the government’s regulatory burden, including a proposal yesterday to dump a handful of rules for hospitals in the Medicare program that the administration considers unnecessary or obsolete.

“From the start, the Administration has taken a balanced regulatory approach, focusing on putting in place lifesaving protections, while eliminating tens of millions of hours of paperwork burdens for our nation’s citizens and businesses,” said the spokeswoman, Jessica Santillo, in an e-mail. “As part of this approach, President Obama has launched an historic review of existing rules on the books to streamline, modify, or get rid of those that cost too much or no longer make sense, an effort that is already on track to save billions of dollars.”

Original post is Health-Care’s Added Cost: Compliance by Political Capital.

Photographer: Mark Elias/Bloomberg

The backup camera and EV logo from a 2011 Nissan Leaf Zero Emission Electric car.

Safety advocates who want to see rearview cameras in all cars and light trucks to avoid backover deaths have been waiting for a $2.7 billion regulation that the Department of Transportation was required by law to issue a year ago.

It looks like they’ll have to wait a bit longer.

The rule won’t be out this week because the regulatory review isn’t complete, according to a Transportation Department official familiar with the situation who wasn’t authorized to discuss it.

The standard was required to be issued by the end of 2011 under a law signed by President George W. Bush in 2008. The law is named for Cameron Gulbransen, a New York 2-year-old who died after his father accidentally backed over him. When the Transportation Department last delayed the regulation Feb. 28, it issued a statement promising to issue the regulation by the end of the year.

Backup cameras are available now on 57 percent of new cars and 83 percent of light trucks sold in the U.S., according to Edmunds.com.

The rule may save about 146 lives a year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated in 2010 when it issued the proposed standard. While the proposed rule didn’t explicitly require rearview cameras, no other technology currently meets the standard.

Backover accidents cause 292 U.S. deaths annually, most frequently killing children and the elderly. Assuming half those deaths can be averted by cameras, the rule would cost about $18.5 million per life saved, according to calculations by the safety agency.

Original post is Rear-View Camera Rule: A Year Overdue, Delayed Again by Political Capital.

Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Under Lisa Jackson, the EPA negotiated fuel-efficiency standards with automakers and set the first-ever rules for mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants

Lisa Jackson, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is leaving in January.

The EPA director’s four-year tenure has been marked by controversy over regulation of matters such as the Keystone pipeline.

President Barack Obama suggested today that Jackson’s tenure also has been marked by “sensible and important steps to protect the air we breathe and the water we drink.”

That includes “implementing the first national standard for harmful mercury pollution, taking important action to combat climate change under the Clean Air Act, and playing a key role in establishing historic fuel economy standards that will save the average American family thousands of dollars at the pump, while also slashing carbon pollution,,” Obama said in a statement released by the White House.

“I will leave the EPA confident the ship is sailing in the right direction,” Jackson, 50, said today in a statement released by the agency. Her plan is to leave after the president’s State of the Union speech next month.

Under Jackson, the EPA negotiated fuel-efficiency standards with automakers and set the first-ever rules for mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants.

 Jim Snyder and Mark Drajem contributed.

Original post is EPA’s Jackson Leaving in January by Political Capital.

Photograph by Jim Mone/AP Photo

The interlock ignition system which requires the driver to blow into a tube to prove sobriety before driving.

AAA, the motorist group with more than 53 million members, is endorsing the National Transportation Safety Board’s call for mandatory use of ignition interlock devices for all drunken-driving offenders.

AAA issued its statement five days before New Year’s Eve, which the group calls the deadliest day on U.S. roads. Interlocks require a driver to blow into a tube to prove his or her sobriety before starting a car, and are required for first-time DUI offenders in about one-third of states.

The NTSB two weeks ago called for mandatory interlocks, something Mothers Against Drunk Driving began pushing in 2006.

It’s part of what AAA has said is a concerted effort to have a louder voice on policy. The group last month warned that an ethanol-blended gasoline called E15 – which the Obama administration supports – may confuse consumers and damage car engines.

Interlocks, for which offenders pay installation costs and a monthly fee, should only be required for repeat offenders and those whose blood-alcohol content is egregiously high, says a coalition of restaurants and alcoholic beverage distributors. That group, which won’t disclose its members, is the chief voice of opposition to interlocks for first-time offenders.

It’s up to states to enact traffic-safety laws, including those requiring interlocks. But pushing at a national level for change is a tried-and-true model with notches of success for initiatives including mandatory seat belt use, lowering the limit for drunk driving to .08 blood-alcohol content, and raising the legal drinking age to 21.

Original post is Ignition Interlocks for First-Time DUI Offenders? by Political Capital.

Photograph by John Wright/The Paducah Sun/AP Photo

Rep. Ed Whitfield during the Rally for Coal at the River Discovery Center in downtown Paducah, Ky.

A Kentucky Republican says the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has gone rogue, reviving his campaign to rein in the regulator.

Representative Ed Whitfield, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s panel on energy and power, quoted from court cases the EPA lost on its clean air and clean water rules, and a 2011 order by a judge who rejected the agency’s arguments as “horsefeathers!”

“I am deeply troubled by an agency operating outside of its legal authority,” Whitfield said in a letter dated today to President Barack Obama. The EPA is “a rogue agency that is making up authorities it does not legally possess in order to accomplish its policy goals.”

The EPA has become a favorite target of House Republicans, who have passed legislation to scuttle or postpone EPA regulations. Whitfield in July said the EPA’s rules to combat global warming were “considerably worse that the disease.”

In his letter to Obama, Whitfield cited excerpts from five court cases that struck down the EPA’s rules, or ordered the action to end delays in issuing a permit.

Whitfield cited the August decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington invalidating he EPA’s cross-state air pollution rule, saying the EPA “pursued its reading of the statutory text down the rabbit hole to a wonderland where EPA defines its target after the states’ chance to comply with the target has already passed.”

The lawmaker cited a federal judge’s March rejection of the EPA’s effort to invalidate Arch Coal Inc.’s Corps of Engineers permit for coal mining in West Virginia, saying “this is a stunning power for an agency to arrogate to itself when there is absolutely no mention of it in the statute.”

Whitfield quotes from a decision ordering the EPA to issue a permit for a planned California power plant, which had been pending since 2008. The judge rejected the agency’s efforts to suggest Congress’s intend was “somehow ambigious” and the court should defer to its intrepretation.  “Horsefeathers!” the judge responded.

“The EPA’s self-serving misinterpretation of Congress’s mandate is too clever by half, and an obvious effort to protect its regulatory process at the expense of Congress’s clean intention,” the judge wrote, cited in Whitfield’s letter. “Put simply, that dog won’t hunt.”

Original post is EPA Deemed ‘Rogue’ by Republican Urging Obama to Rein in Agency by Political Capital.

Photograph by Michael Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images

Moderator Jim Lehrer, center, asks President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to respect the order of speaking during the Presidential Debate.

“Regulation is essential. You can’t have the free market work if you don’t have regulation,” Republican Mitt Romney said tonight. “At the same time, regulation can become excessive… With some of the regulation that has passed during the president’s term,” he said, “it has hurt the economy.”

He called the Dodd-Frank financial regulation “the biggest kiss” that’s been given to banks. “I would replace it,” he said, saying some parts of the law “make all the sense in the world.”

“The reason we have been in such an enormous economic crisis was reckless behavior across the board,” Obama said a little more than half-way through his first debate with Romney. “We stepped in… and had the toughest reforms on Wall Street since the 1930s.”

Romney has said he wants to repel Dodd-Frank, Obama noted.

“The question is, does anybody out there think a big problem we have is there was too much oversight and regulation of Wall Street… because if you do, then Governor Romney is your candidate,” Obama said.

Romney objected, pointing to elements of the law that he supports

Still, he said, the implementation of the law has been slow and left uncertainty.

Original post is Obama-Romney Debate: Wall Street by Political Capital.

Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Mitt Romney is given a tour by Google Vice President Jim Lecinski at the Google Chicago headquarters.

Charlie Black, a veteran Republican strategist and adviser to GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, criticized “phony antitrust suits” at an event co-sponsored by Google Inc., a lobbying client whose competitive practices are
under U.S. investigation.

“Phony antitrust suits that are completely unnecessary are a distraction” hindering technological innovation in the U.S., Black said at a panel discussion on economic development at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida. Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, co-sponsored the event.

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether Mountain View, California-based Google is abusing its dominance as operator of the world’s most popular search engine.

The FTC is focusing on whether Google unfairly ranks search results to favor its own businesses and increases advertising rates for competitors, people familiar with the investigation have said. The agency also is examining whether the company uses its control of the Android mobile operating system to discourage
smartphone and device makers from using rivals’ applications, the people said.

Black’s firm, Prime Policy Group, received $70,000 in lobbying income from Google during the first quarter of this year, according to disclosures filed with the U.S. Senate.

Black said during a brief interview after the panel discussion that he was referring to the federal investigation of Google.

“The FTC and the Justice Department are fighting over who gets to go after Google, because they’re big and successful,” Black said. “The FTC’s mandate is to protect consumers. Where are the consumers that are hurt?”

Black said the fault lies with Democratic political appointees’ exercise of discretion in antitrust enforcement.

Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel, and Rachel Whetstone, the company’s senior vice president for communications and public policy, were among those in attendance as Black spoke.

Original post is Romney Adviser Criticizes ‘Phony’ Google Antitrust Probe by Political Capital.

Photograph by Mediscan/Corbis

A transmission electron micrograph (TEM) of E. coli O157:H7.

“The E. coli Club” — Nancy Pelosi’s term for the Republicans.

“Bless their hearts, it’s a philosophy that the Republicans in Congress have, and bless their hearts, they act upon their beliefs,” Pelosi, the former House speaker and current Democratic leader from California, said at a campaign event for Lois Frankel, a former West Palm Beach mayor running for Congress.

“It’s an ideology — `we shouldn’t have a government role,”’ Pelosi explained to an audience in Boca Raton, Florida, with Frankel by her side. “`So reduce the police, the fire, the teachers, reduce their role. Give tax cuts to the high end, that will stimulate the economy and everything will be good.”’

“And I say to them, `Do you have children who breathe the air, do you have grandchildren who drink water?’ I’m a mom. I have five kids,” Pelosi said. “As a mom, I was vigilant about food safety, right moms? You could depend on the government for one thing — it was about, you had to be able to trust the water that our kids drank and the food that they ate.”

“But this is the E. coli club,” the Californian told the Floridians. “They do not want to spend money to do that.”

Frankel is a loyal Democrat, a former state legislator who has run for governor and a trial lawyer  – she didn’t flinch at the E coli. We thought we caught a smile there.

The Mayo Clinic — and they have one in Florida — reminds us: “Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria normally live in the intestines of healthy people and animals. Most varieties of E. coli are harmless or cause relatively brief diarrhea. But a few particularly nasty strains, such as E. coli O157:H7, can cause severe abdominal cramps, bloody diarrhea and vomiting.”

Original post is Pelosi’s `E. Coli Club:’ Republicans by Political Capital.

Photograph by Charly Kurz/laif/Redux

Sanford "Sandy" Weill

Sanford Weill is blowing Washington minds.

The former Citigroup CEO who helped engineer the country’s current financial system in the late ’90s says he now thinks investment banks and commercial banks should be split up.

His change of heart voiced on CNBC this week surprised pundits, banking leaders and lawmakers alike.

Frank Keating, president and CEO of the Washington-based American Bankers Association, said he was “dismayed” by Weill’s suggestion.

“It’s time to push the pause button on flawed proposals that would damage the U.S. economy,” Keating said in a statement today.

Karen Shaw Petrou, managing partner and co-founder of Federal Financial Analytics, argued that Weill’s suggestion couldn’t hold water. But first, she called out his about-face.

“Is Sandy Weill Wall Street’s Alfred Nobel, who took his then-untold millions earned by arms trafficking and created an eponymous peace prize?” she wrote in a memo to clients today. “Or is he more like a madam who, recanting profitable sins, heads to a comfortable convent populated by society’s nicest ladies?”

Former Senator Chris Dodd and Representative Barney Frank, after whom the 2010 financial overhaul was named, both criticized Weill’s comments on CNBC. His suggestion is poorly timed and unnecessary given the Dodd-Frank Act’s restrictions on proprietary trading known as the Volcker rule, Frank said yesterday.

Weill’s endorsement of bank breakups was hailed as “good news”  by Senator Sherrod Brown. The Ohio Democrat is having trouble getting traction for a bill he introduced in May that would limit the size of banks.

“People who understand what’s happening with banks realize that these banks are too big to fail, too big to manage and too big to regulate,” Brown said in an interview yesterday.

Senator Robert Corker, Brown’s colleague on the Senate Banking Committee, said overseers’ ability to regulate banks has always been questionable, but Weill’s star power gives his remarks some kick.

“It’s just not possible to regulate in such a way that risk that’s concentrated in this way is mitigated,” the Tennessee Republican said in an interview yesterday. “I think people are looking at a lot of things, stronger capital. But I do think coming from someone like this makes it interesting and probably causes people to focus more on what he’s saying.”

Lawmakers hope to reach a decision on the Volcker rule by the end of the year, so Weill might have to wait a while for another banking overhaul.

Original post is Banking’s Sandy Weill: Latter-Day Nobel Playing with Dynamite? by Political Capital.

Photograph by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

An automated teller machine (ATM) in San Francisco.

Call it a sign of the regulatory times:

Banks want relief from a requirement to post signs on automated teller machines advising customers of the fee they’ll pay for a transaction.

That relief is called H.R. 4367.

Chris Strohm reports for Bloomberg Government’s Congress Tracker that the law as it stands requires banks and credit unions to give consumers two notices that they face fees if they’re not using their own banks’ ATMs. It’s in the Electronic Fund Transfer Act:

One notice must be physically placed on the face of the machine; the other displayed electronically on the ATM screen or on a paper notice issued after a transaction.

The law also makes banks liable for as much as $500,000 in class-action lawsuits for failure to post signs — which makes thefts of signs by mischief makers a potentially big problem — according to a committee report on the bill. Aggrieved individuals can collect as much as $1,000 per transaction — which takes a lot of ATM fees to cover.

“Repealing this outdated and unnecessary duplicative requirement would cause no harm to consumers,” says House Financial Services Committee Chairman Spencer Bachus. “They would still be notified on the ATM screen of any fees and still have the ability to decline those fees and terminate the transaction.”

Here’s no surprise, as Strohm reports:

The bill is backed by the American Bankers Association, the Independent Community Bankers of America, the ATM Industry Association, the American Gaming Association, the Consumers Bankers Association, the Credit Union National Association, the Electronic Funds Transfer Association, the Food Marketing Institute, the National Association of Convenience Stores and the National Association of Federal Credit Unions.

Original post is The Owner of This ATM May Charge You an Added $3 Fee Per Transaction by Political Capital.