Watch Your Health and Your Pocketbook: A Bi-Partisan Scheme for Regulatory Deform

Thursday 6 October 2011

by: Gerald Epstein, TripleCrisis | Report 

 

Right wing politicians in the U.S. have gotten very good at channeling George Orwell: As the world economy teeters on the brink of another economic catastrophe whose precipitating cause was a twenty year project to de-regulate finance in the U.S. and abroad, they insist that the cause of our woes is “job killing” regulations. Never mind that, according to the World Bank, the U.S. ranks 5th in the world in terms of ease of doing business in relation to regulations, and that over the past 5 years, doing business in the U.S. overall has become easier, not harder. The same report shows that in the OECD the ease of doing business has stayed the same or improved since 2006. Yet in the OECD countries 50% more people were unemployed in 2010 than in 2007.