Obama's Regulatory Overhaul

According to Obama in public, he is going to review regulations in each agency and weigh the cost-benefit of them to determine which ones should be repealed. As the WSJ notes, this is his typical doublespeak nonsense.

No sooner had Mr. Obama told the bureaucracies to subject all regulations to a cost-benefit test than the bureaucrats began telling reporters that they are already a model of modern efficiency, thank you very much. Among many others, the Environmental Protection Agency said in a statement that it was "confident" it wouldn't need to alter a single current or pending rule. "In fact, EPA's rules consistently yield billions in cost savings that make them among the most cost-effective in the government."

Perhaps the EPA's confidence owes to a little-noticed proviso in Mr. Obama's order. When the agencies weigh costs and benefits, the order says, they should always consider "values that are difficult or impossible to quantify, including equity, human dignity, fairness, and distributive impacts."

So after you factor in all those immeasurable qualities (similar to those "saved or created jobs"), the agencies won't have to change any regulations at all.