You know you’re having an impact when the opposition squeals. And, sometimes the more shrill the squeal the more successful you can feel. Such is the case for Senator Dave Cox’s and my hearings on business regulations.
A liberal blogger, Adam Eran, has taken the bait. See his piece here. Aside from his clumsy attempt at misdirection, he opens his rant with an inaccuracy that betrays his knee-jerk close-mindedness.
We must be doing something right!
The whole of Mr. Eran’s blog post is just the tired regurgitation of the left’s vilification of the Bush years and past Republican dominance at the national level. Even they must be growing weary. It is a tediously familiar recant of the allegedly lax regulatory enforcement of the Bush administration that was the supposed sole cause of the economic mess we’re in, and the stale accusation of wanting to starve government that goes back to the myths stoked in bringing down Newt Gingrich.
The former ignores the policies of Democrats that encouraged loans to those simply with a pulse and facilitated by the shaky Freddy and Fanny propped up by Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. The latter is the perpetuation of a fiction born out of a total perversion of an out-of-context quote by the former Speaker.
But, more importantly, it is all an irrelevant misdirection. Our hearings have nothing to do with national policy. And the business people who have testified are not concerned with partisan politics. They are battling for their economic lives, threatened by a tanked economy. All they see is the hand of their state government, through rules restricting their legitimate operating flexibility and personified by the California Air Resources Board zealously regulating away their livelihood and that of their employees, pushing their heads back under the rising tide of economic woe.
A helping hand for our job producers would seem wise, but Mr. Eran just wants to re-live his distaste of George Bush and Newt Gingrich. Get over it!
His lack of any grasp of the fundamental issue, though, was exposed at the outset. He attacks my mention of the “partisan” report by Sacramento State Dean Sanjay Varshney exposing the costs of regulating greenhouse gases. Other than the fact that he perverts that particular report, he actually had the wrong one. I actually cited a Varshney study that was commissioned as a result of legislation approved in the Democratic Majority State Legislature, and authored by a Democrat. The study was an analysis of the impact of all regulations on small business.
Simply put, Mr. Eran used the occasion of our hearings to simply “hear himself speak.” His simplistic frustrations of his liberal outlook don’t allow him to see the compelling points of our effort. We are simply interested in discussing what California can do to enable our economic recovery. Mr. Eran wants to wax partisanship.
As I said, we must be doing something right!
