FDA Regulations Could Wipe Out 99 Percent Of E-Cigarette Industry

The e-cigarette industry could be all but wiped out thanks to regulations coming down the pipeline from the Food and Drug Administration.

Most damaging of all, e-cigarette makers will have to retroactively submit marketing applications for all their products, with the costs running into the millions.

Manufacturers of e-cigarettes could also be banned from advertising the reduced risk from substituting smoking for vaping unless they can convince the FDA otherwise.

In 2009, e-cigarettes came under the purview of the FDA and may face many of the restrictions placed on the tobacco industry, such as issuing health warnings and stopping sales to minors.

The e-cig industry is still relatively young, with the first e-cigarette invented in China in 2007. Despite there being close to 20 million Americans regularly using e-cigarettes, the FDA’s regulations could bankrupt the vast majority of producers.

Speaking to The Hill, Jan Verleur, co-founder and CEO of VMR Products, said as much as 99 percent of the industry could be wiped out. “This makes it so any product released after the grandfather date would require premarket approval,” said Verleur.

He added that ”the process could cost us half a million to million dollars,” per individual product. With more than 500 e-cigarette products, VMR Products would have to pay five times the company’s revenue.

His comments echo those of the president of the American Vaping Association Greg Conley who told the L.A. Times Monday that 99 percent of the small businesses in the industry could close their doors.

There is as of yet no fixed date for when the rules come into force. The FDA has said it will give companies two years to submit their applications and they will be able to sell the products under review during that time.

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Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation

Via: California Political Review

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Vending Machines Must Post Calorie Counts and Other 2014 New Regulations

If we were to design a regulatory framework from scratch, for any sector of a modern economy, it would make no sense to ignore regulatory costs and benefits.

It would make even less sense to implement new rules and regulations and then worry about their impact.

But that’s pretty much what we do in the U.S., where we allow politics to trump common sense.

The 2008 financial crisis is the perfect example. For decades the industry has been as regulated as any on the planet, and some of these rules clearly contributed to the crisis.

But we still allowed politicians to blame the crisis on the free market and then institute more of the same regulations that led to the meltdown. The overall reach of federal regulators goes well beyond the financial sector, though, and nobody should be surprised that the economy is just muddling along.

How bad is the regulatory environment?

The ninth annual Red Tape Rising report gives a great overview; it tracks the volume and, to the extent possible, the cost of federal regulations.

(Two of my colleagues, James Gattuso and Diane Katz hosted a Heritage Foundation event to introduce the report. Anyone can watch online.)

Believe it or not, the federal government doesn’t officially track regulatory costs as it does with things like taxes and spending.

But executive branch agencies that promulgate “major rules”—defined as those expected to cost the economy $100 million or more annually—provide some cost estimates for the rules they issue. These agencies estimated that their major rules from 2014 will cost the economy approximately $80 billion per year.

These are the regulators’ cost figures, though, so they probably underestimate the true cost. Estimates from various independent sources put these costs from hundreds of billions of dollars to over $2 trillion annually.

Via: The Daily Signal

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New record: Feds issued 56 regs for every new law, 3,659 in 2013

The Obama administration made up for the lack of laws passed in Congress last year, issuing a whopping 3,659 rules regulations, crushing claims that Washington isn't doing anything.

Only 65 public laws were signed by President Obama in 2013, meaning that his government issued an average of 56 new regulations for every one, a record high ratio, according to the annual analysis by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

The surge in regulations has led critics to charge that Congress is now a bystander to federal regulatory agencies

Said CEI’s Wayne Crews, who provided Secrets with his new analysis, “The deterioration of the Constitution’s separation of, and balance of, powers means that regulators and bureaucrats now make most laws. Congress is so 1789, after all. The executive branch increasingly imposes its will: President Obama and his administration repeatedly say they are not going to wait for Congress, so brace yourselves.”

Crews' chart, which he titles the “Unconstitutionality Index,” shows that in four of Obama's five years as president, his ratio of regulations to new laws has been higher than any of former President George W. Bush.

It also shows that Congress hit a 10-year low in passing laws in 2013. But the number of new regulations to support those laws was about average.

Via: Washington Examiner

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'HIDDEN TAX': Red Tape Tab Nears $2T

For America's businesses, the Obama administration has an unpleasant holiday surprise.

A new report on the government's regulatory actions was released just before Thanksgiving, and it contains more than 3,300 rules -- which the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) estimates will cost more than $1.8 trillion to implement on an annual basis.

At a time when the economy is still struggling to zoom out of its post-recession rut, businesses worry that the crush of regulation is another sandbag weighing down the recovery.

"Back in the '90s, the federal budget itself was not even $1.8 trillion," said Wayne Crews, vice president of policy for CEI. "Now we have this entire $1.8 trillion hidden tax, you could say, of government compliance and intervention cost imposed in the economy."

The latest monthly jobs report from the Labor Department showed gains in hiring in November, which helped push the unemployment rate down to 7 percent, a five-year low. But many of the new jobs added in the last several months were low wage, and more growth is needed for the economy to truly rebound.

Via: Fox News

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The Thanksgiving Menu: Overstuffed with Regulations

On the fourth Thursday of November, our attention naturally turns to food and football the Pilgrims who celebrated America’s first Thanksgiving. After great privation, a bountiful harvest inspired the Plymouth colony to lay a great feast.

That they survived is remarkable. After all, there was no Environmental Protection Agency to restrict the greenhouse gases escaping from all that burning wood. No Department of Labor to inspect the whipsaws, augers, and chisels employed in home construction. Nor was the  

U.S. Department of Agriculture at the ready to dole out subsidies and manage crop production.

But lo, anarchy there was not. The intrepid Pilgrims organized themselves (themselves!) to protect kin and hearth through the Mayflower Compact. Signed on November 11, 1620, the compact obligated its signatories to “solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic; for our better ordering, and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony.”

Alas, “from time to time” has given way in the modern age to “incessantly.” There is virtually no aspect of our lives over which laws and ordinances do not reign. In the Obama Administration’s first term alone, regulatory burdens on Americans increased by nearly $70 billion.

Via: The Foundry

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ANALYSIS OF COSTS CAUSED BY EPA REGULATION

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently proposed onerous new limits carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. The standards would prevent construction of new facilities, gradually close older ones and eventually affect even gas-fired units, says Paul Driessen, senior policy adviser for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.

EPA says the rules will safeguard our health and welfare from storms, sea level rise and other ravages of man-made climate change. They are in addition to 1,900 other Obama-era regulations designed to curtail or terminate coal mining and use — and dictate activities affecting air and emissions, land and soils, waterways and puddles.

Many scientists challenge EPA’s claim that carbon dioxide controls climate change.

• They point to solar, cosmic, oceanic and other factors the agency ignores; and note that higher concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) spur plant growth and green our planet.
• They point out that humans contribute only 4 percent of the CO2 that enters the atmosphere each year, and U.S. coal-based power generation is responsible for only 3 percent of worldwide human CO2 emissions.

In other words, the power plants EPA wants to shut down account for a trivial 0.01 percent of the carbon dioxide added to Earth’s atmosphere annually, raising CO2 levels to about 0.04 percent of the atmosphere.

Via: Human Events

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Businesses hire up to deal with more regs

A growing thicket of federal regulations under the Obama administration has contributed to an employment spike in at least one corner of the job market: the increasingly vital compliance industry.
 
ObamaCare, the Dodd-Frank Act and other large federal undertakings have led to an outpouring of new agency rules derided by business groups and defended by advocates.
 
But the regulations have also been a boon for professional compliance officers paid to help companies understand and adapt to the new requirements.  

“Staff to track compliance issues is on the rise, and it has been for the last several years,” said Richard Riese, senior vice president for regulatory compliance at the American Bankers Association. “And, at the moment, there’s no prospect it will decrease anytime soon.”
 
Data kept by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows an 18-percent increase in the number of compliance officers in the United States between 2009 and 2012, according to an analysis conducted by the conservative American Action Forum (AAF).
 
At last count, there were an estimated 227,500 compliance officers employed in the United States, according to the BLS. The bureau defines a compliance officer as an employee responsible for evaluating conformity with laws and regulations.
 
The agency estimates do not include professions like bank examiners, tax collectors, or Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspectors that are tasked to monitor companies for fraud and safety violations. 

Compliance officers make an average of just under $65,000 annually, a gross national labor cost of roughly $14.7 billion, according to the BLS data. 

Via: The Hill

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Top Dem Admits: ‘We Knew’

THEY LIED TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AND STILL ARE NOT ACCOUNTABLE

House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer conceded to reporters today that Democrats knew people would not be able to keep their current health care plans under Obamacare and expressed qualified contrition for President Obama’s repeated vows to the contrary.

“We knew that there would be some policies that would not qualify and therefore people would be required to get more extensive coverage,” Hoyer said in response to a question from National Review.

Asked by another reporter how repeated statements by Obama to the contrary weren’t “misleading,” Hoyer said “I don’t think the message was wrong. I think the message was accurate. It was not precise enough…[it] should have been caveated with – ‘assuming you have a policy that in fact does do what the bill is designed to do.’”

Hoyer noted that people losing access to their current plans are mostly in the individual market, which is a small segment of the overall market. He also argued requiring those plans to follow new mandates and regulations was important for ensuring those plans included “adequate coverage so the public would not have to be on the hook for serious illnesses or other illnesses.”

Via: NRO

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11,588,500 Words: Obamacare Regs 30x as Long as Law

(CNSNews.com) -- Bureaucracies in the Obama Administration have thus far published approximately 11,588,500 words of final Obamacare regulations, while there are only 381,517 words in the Obamacare law itself.

That means unelected federal officials have now written 30 words of regulations for each word in the law.

What is commonly known as the Obamacare law includes both the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act (HCERA). Since these bills were signed into law by President Barack Obama in March 2010, various agencies in the administration have published 109 final regulations spelling out how they are to be implemented.

These 109 final regulations account for a combined 10,535 pages in the Federal Register, where the government officially published them.

The Federal Register presents the regulations in relatively small type with three columns of text on each page. CNSNews.com calculated that there is an average of 1,100 words on each of these pages by counting the actual words in one 78-page Obamacare regulation and then dividing by 78.

Via: CNS News

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EPA Head: ‘Climate Change...Is One of Most Significant Public Health Threats'

(CNSNews.com) - EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy on Friday discussed the agency’s 493-page proposed regulation that would, for the first time, restrict carbon emissions from new power plants, including coal plants.

“Climate change – caused by carbon pollution – is one of the most significant public health threats of our time,” McCarthy said at the National Press Club.  “That’s why EPA has been called to action.”

McCarthy cited power plants as the nation's worst polluters.

“Power plants are the single largest sources of carbon pollution,” McCarthy said. “New power plants can minimize their carbon emissions by taking advantage of modern technologies.”

McCarthy expressed her commitment to fulfilling the promises President Barack Obama made when he revealed his plan to combat climate change at Georgetown University in June. McCarthy called it the “most important speech” made by the president.

But critics, including Republicans in Congress, see the EPA regulations as a war on coal. The Obama administration, in fact, has spent billions of dollars promoting "green" power from wind, sun and ocean waves.

“The announcement by the EPA is another back door attempt

Via: CNS News

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Obamacare Regulations Are 8 Times Longer Than Bible

(CNSNews.com) – Since March 2010, when President Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and its companion Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act (HCERA), the administration has published in the Federal Register 109 final regulations governing how Obamacare will be implemented.

These regulations add up to 10,516 pages in the Federal Register—or more than eight times as many pages as there are in the Gutenberg Bible, which has 642 two-sided leaves or 1,286 pages.

Using the regulations.gov website and the Federal Register itself, CNSNews.com found 109 distinct regulations for the implementation of PPACA and the health-care related provisions of HCERA that had been finalized by various federal agencies and published in the Federal Register as of Sept. 9, 2013

Via: CNS News

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Obama's regulations are viewed as seriously flawed

In fact, why limit it to Obama? The entire regulatory process is a mess, with no way to root out regs that have outlived their usefulness or become too burdensome. Plus, the process is opaque and vulnerable to industry lobbyists.

The Hill:

Over the years, Congress and presidents have tinkered with the inner-workings of the regulatory apparatus, placing new restrictions on agencies charged with writing rules, and ordering them to root out those that are outdated or overly burdensome.

Despite those tweaks, the current system lacks any institutional mechanism to expunge unneeded federal restrictions. 

There are no strict time limits requiring administrations to either issue or withdraw proposed rules aside from those specifically set by laws or the courts. And both advocates and critics of stronger regulations complain of a lack of transparency to the process.

"It's totally broken," said Peg Seminario, the AFL-CIO's longtime director of Occupational Safety and Health. "The system is basically a poster child for how government doesn't work."

Yet when it comes to potential solutions, there is little consensus.

Republicans and industry groups, who have bemoaned what they view as overly aggressive federal agencies, want more restrictions on the rulemaking process and a greater reliance on economic analysis in decisions regarding new regulations.

Democrats, unions and public interest groups, meanwhile, say agencies are already hamstrung by existing restrictions on their authority, and argue that open-ended White House reviews have led to a pattern of delays in important protections.

Via: American Thinker

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