Dodd-Frank: Why Government is Like Cancer [Reader Post]

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Cancer is a condition in which normal body processes are co-opted and body tissues are destroyed as more diseased tissue proliferates. If left unchecked, cancer can grow rapidly until the host is dead. The Dodd-Frank bill is a clear demonstration of how government is like cancer.

The Department of Education was formed in 1980. The proposed budget for FY 2011 is $77.8 billion and it doesn’t educate a single kid. What it does do well is spend money without return. Actually, there’s really no way to measure the ROI on the DOE. And education really hasn’t changed much since then. What has happened? Education is getting worse. This agency is a failure.

The Department of Energy was formed in 1977 with the purpose of ending dependence on foreign oil. In 1979 the US imported 38% of its oil. In 2009 that number grew to 57%. This agency is another failure.

The Dodd-Frank bill, making its way through Congress, is 2300 pages long and pretty much incomprehensible, even to its authors.

“It’s a great moment. I’m proud to have been here,” said a teary-eyed Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), who as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee led the effort in the Senate. “No one will know until this is actually in place how it works.”

We’ll have to pass it to find out what’s in it, I guess. That’s a great moment for sure.

We know some things about the bill. It will require 243 new rule-makings.

In a recent note to clients, the law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell needed more than 150 pages merely to summarize the bureaucratic ecosystem created by Dodd-Frank. As the nearby table shows, the lawyers estimate that the law will require no fewer than 243 new formal rule-makings by 11 different federal agencies.

And it’s going to tighten credit even more. The bill casts a shadow on farmers and is expected to kill jobs. It apparently has stealth racial quotas.

Translated out of bureaucratic mumbo jumbo, this means federal hacks can pressure a vast array of private companies to make hiring decisions based on race. It is a backdoor way of instituting a racial quota system. Sure, no law will officially require a quota, but if the head of a small credit union doesn’t want to be harassed by the regulatory agency, or if there is a danger of losing any contract or subcontract with any larger institution subject to these regulations, he will know darn well that he needs to show that his institution has a high proportion of minorities and women as employees.

Deutsche Bank shares some of my specific concerns about this boondoggle:

Stopping short of calling Dodd-Frank the “U.S. Bank Bureaucrats’ Full Employment Act,” Deutsche criticizes the legislation because it “would create a massive increase in the number of new agencies..thousands of new employees will be needed across a full range of existing U.S. regulatory agencies.”

It counts 13 new bank agencies: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; Financial Stability Oversight Council; Federal Insurance Office; New Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion; Investor Advisory Committee; Office of Investor Advocate; Office of Credit Ratings; Credit Rating Agency Board; Office of Financial Literacy; Office of Financial Research; Office of Housing Counseling; Office of Fair Lending and Equal Opportunity; and the Office of Financial Protection for Older Americans.

This loopy bill will create 13 new government agencies and need thousands of new employees.

Government employees.

The kind who are generally ineffective as illustrated above.

The kind who will need weeks and weeks of vacation, need pensions and health care.

All at the cost of you. And me.

So if we need all these new agencies, it must be because something’s not working. We have a zillion laws already.

So what is being cut out to make way for this? What is that doesn’t work that is being eliminated?

The answer, of course, is Chris Dodd and Barney Frank. Except that they’re not being eliminated.

The new law is said to do this:

– Give the government new powers to break up teetering companies which, if allowed to fail, would threaten the economy.

Except for Fannie and Freddie. The two worst offenders are not even mentioned in the bill. Obama has taken out the plug to allow endless money to flow in the twin drains known as GSE’s.

WASHINGTON — The government has handed its ATM card to beleaguered mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The Treasury Department said Thursday it removed the $400 billion financial cap on the money it will provide to keep the companies afloat. Already, taxpayers have shelled out $111 billion to the pair, and a senior Treasury official said losses are not expected to exceed the government’s estimate this summer of $170 billion over 10 years.

And that worked out swell:

Mortgage giant Fannie Mae is seeking another $8.4 billion in federal bailout money, after the Obama administration earlier lifted a $400 billion limit on bailouts for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-sponsored mortgage giants that officials say were at the “core” of “what went wrong” in the financial crisis. Last week, Freddie Mac asked for $10.6 billion more in bailouts. The Obama administration is certain to approve the requests: “Late last year, the Obama administration pledged to cover unlimited losses through 2012 for Freddie and Fannie,” reports the New York Times.

And when we know how all this works? Maybe never.

“It is not a perfect bill, I will be the first to admit that,” he said. “It will take the next economic crisis, as certainly it will come, to determine whether or not the provisions of this bill will actually provide this generation or the next generation of regulators with the tools necessary to minimize the effects of that crisis.”

Today the Senate passed a bill that no one actually knows how or if it works, there’s no way to know if it’s effective and it’s far from perfect. But what I can predict with absolute certainty is that the budgets for the agencies created by this bill will grow like……like…..like…….a cancer.

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