President Obama's regulatory czar Cass Sunstein is trying to defend the indefensible.  He told a group in Washington yesterday that Barack Obama is responsible for less regulatory costs than George Bush.  For a while now, Sunstein has been inundated with complaints from business leaders about the “tsunami” of regulations.   Sunstein said, "The annual cost of regulations has not increased during the Obama administration.  In its last two years, executive agencies in the Bush administration proposed far higher regulatory costs than did those agencies in the Obama administration in our first two years."

Well … we all know how politicians love to parse language so that they can give you a completely wrong impression without actually straying from the truth.  It’s an actual art.  Note, please, the use of the phrase “those agencies” in Sunstein’s statement.  Is he perhaps manufacturing a little wiggle room here?  The regulations that many small businesses fear – the regulations that cause many small businesses to forego hiring at this time – are regulations associated with ObamaCare and the Dodd/Frank financial regulation bill.   These hideous pieces of legislation belong to Obama, not to Bush, so perhaps it can be argued that “those agencies” aren’t inclusive of these two dangerous bills.  Just sayin’ here.  At any rate, it is ridiculously easy to put Sunstein’s statement to the test and prove it to be absurd.  Read on …………

Based on data from the Government Accountability Office, as analyzed by the Heritage Foundation, Cass Sunstein is ---- duhhhhh -- wrong.

In FY 2009, which spanned the Bush and Obama Administrations, rulemaking proceeded at a nearly unprecedented rate, with the addition of 23 major rules imposing $13 billion in new costs.

But the available evidence indicates that regulatory costs increased last year at a far greater pace. According to data from the Government Accountability Office, federal agencies promulgated 43 rules during the fiscal year ending September 30, 2010, that impose significant burdens on the private sector. The total costs for these rules were estimated by the regulators themselves at some $28 billion, the highest level since at least 1981, the earliest date for which figures are available.

And in 2011, we have the implementation of the Dodd–Frank bill, which will require 243 new formal rule-makings by 11 different federal agencies.

Was Cass Sunstein lying – he knew his statement to be untrue at the time he said it – or is he just flat-out terrible at his job and doesn’t know the figures on regulation, even though he is the regulatory czar?