A “truly awful piece of legislation” could “sneak through the 112th Congress before it adjourns at year’s end,” an editorial in the Nov. 13th St. Louis Post-Dispatch warns.
The legislation is the Independent Agency Regulatory Analysis Act (S. 3468), which the editorial describes as a “stealth attack on independent government regulation masquerading as careful ‘cost-benefit analysis.’” S. 3468 would require regulators, “who already do significant cost-benefit analyses… to jump through more hoops,” throwing “a monkey-wrench” into the rule-making process, and “slowing things down.”
The editorial points out that “the financial industry is among the bill’s strongest supporters,” and quotes AFR executive director Lisa Donner about why that might be so. “This is a sideways attack on Dodd-Frank,” Donner says.
“By wide margins, Americans say they want financial reform…” the editorial concludes. “The industry’s best hope [is] that Americans are sick of politics and won’t pay attention. But this is precisely the sort of thing that makes them sick.”