Expensive Regulations, Fannie Mae Bailout and Baseball Stadiums

Americans for Tax Reform marks the annual “Cost of Government Day.”

Plans to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to rescue mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac run into opposition in Congress.

Washington, D.C.’s new baseball stadium fails to live up to its economic promises.

1. BUSINESS

Americans for Tax Reform marks the annual “Cost of Government Day.”

CEI Expert Available to Comment: Vice President for Policy Wayne Crews on how federal regulations add to the cost:

“The bottom line is that federal government regulations ate nearly 10 percent of what the U.S. economy produced last year. At the same time government is also spending more than ever before – $2.73 trillion; and the President has submitted a $3 trillion spending plan for next year. Between paying taxes and paying to comply with government regulations, it’s a crushing burden for American businesses and workers.”

>>>Bonus videos on the costs of regulation here and of Wayne Crews at the Cost of Government Day press conference here.

 

2. CONGRESS

Plans to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to rescue mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac run into opposition in Congress.

CEI Expert Available to Comment: Senior Fellow Eli Lehrer why we should simply let them fail:

“For all the talk of a ‘rescue plan’ for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, I think that there’s a much better solution: let them go broke. Congress should end debate on the rescue plans and, if it does not, President Bush should veto any plan he gets. The massive decline in Freddie and Fannie’s stocks today shows that the rescue plans probably won’t reassure the market anyway. If Freddie and Fannie really are private companies–which their executives have always claimed in public–it follows that their stockholders should assume the great bulk of the risk.”

 

3. SPORTS

Washington, D.C.’s new baseball stadium fails to live up to its economic promises.

CEI Expert Available to Comment: Special Projects Counsel Hans Bader on the disappointing performance of taxpayer-funded sports arenas:

“…the Washington, D.C. City Council is planning to raise taxes on baseball tickets to defray some of the costs of the city-funded stadium for the last-place Washington Nationals. The projected revenue stream from the team turns out to have been about as accurate as Enron’s projected earnings. Attendance at Nationals games has fallen far short of the rosy projections that were used to justify city subsidies for the stadium’s construction. Publicly-funded stadiums never live up to the claims of their boosters, and are always bad for the economies and taxpayers of the localities that fund them.”