A Hint of Things to Come 

We talked about this on the air yesterday, but I wanted to put it in Nealz Nuze so that it would become, as they say, part of the written record.

Last week I went into a little rant on the air about faceless Myrmidons sitting in rows of cubicles in Washington DC writing thousands of pages of regulations to implement ObamaCare and the new consumer financial protection act that the lovely Barney Frank and Chris Dodd crammed down our throats. The way this works, you see, is that the Congress will pass a law and then the bureaucrats in the executive department will stick their earphones in their ears, sit down at their word processors, crank up the iPod and start writing regulations. The members of congress have the authority to review and to challenge these regulations ... but it is an authority that is virtually never exercised.

Now there are two questions you really need to ask yourself at this point. Number one, just how many sets of mindless bureaucrats do we have working on how many sets of regulations? And the second question would be just how many regulations, or pages of regulations, or these people going to produce. Well, we now have a pretty strong hint of things to come.

In the 2700 pages of ObamaCare there are six pages that are devoted to something called "accountable care organizations." Somewhere in the bowels of the offices that house our wonderful Department of Health and Human Services we find a team of rule writers who were assigned the responsibility of writing the rules and regulations governing these six pages of ObamaCare. Tomorrow the work of these bureaucrats will see the light of day when HHS releases these rules. Would anybody care to guess just how many pages these rules will fill in the Federal Register? Try 1000. Yup, you got it! Six pages of ObamaCare are being transformed into 1000 new rules and regulations that will have to be followed by hospitals and doctors who formed networks for the delivery of patient care.

Back to the first question. Just how many bundles of bureaucrats do we have working on these rulemaking processes? I don't know exactly how many there are working on ObamaCare, but we do know that there are over 140 of them working on rulemaking processes for the wonderful new Chris Dodd/Barney Frank consumer finance protection law. That's 140+ rulemaking processes. If the example set by the ObamaCare bureaucrats is followed, perhaps we can expect 150,000 pages of rules that will have to be followed by private businesses engaged in any way in the business of consumer finance and lending. Now you tell me how you think that is going to work out. For a hint; just refer back a couple of weeks to my show dealing with debit cards. As you know one of the rules created for the new consumer protection bill will be that banks can only charge retailers 12 cents every time a debit card is used. Right now the average is 44 cents In order to avoid losses on the use of debit cards banks are already making several changes. Among those changes are monthly fees to debit cardholders, and limits on the amount that you can place on the debit card. There is much more of this coming. I know you can't wait.