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The Dirty Dozen: America's 12 Worst Regulations

The Alexis de Tocqueville Institution recently published The Dirty Dozen: The Twelve Worst Regulations in America.

"These `dirty dozen' regulations make up only the tip of the iceberg. but are among the worst regulations in America," writes Robert Kasten. former senator from Wisconsin, in the introduction. "I hope you find them as informative as I have and enjoy learning about some of the ways our laws do more harm than good. The `dirty dozen provide a good starting point in attempts to pare back what French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville called the `velvet tyranny' of democratic socialism."

Read on, then, for a summary of the "Dirty Dozen":

Office of Management and Budget Circular A-76 requires the government to rip through mountains of red tape in order to contract out services to the private sector.

The Vaccines for Children program stymies private sector research and development into vaccines.

* The Food and Drug Administration now allows medical experiments on patients without their consent.

* The Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendment of 1988 super-regulates medical laboratories, increasing annual labor and overhead costs by $4,435 per physician and costing citizens as much as $2.2 billion annually.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act labels many disruptive and delinquent students as "disabled," preventing school administrators from suspending and expelling violent and disobedient students.

The Clean Water Act frustrates attempts by private citizens in California to clean up abandoned mines that poison their water supply.

Environmental Protexon Agency (EPA) clean-air standards mandate particulate matter levels that harm the economy (as much as $120 billion annually, or $1,240 per household) without improving the public health.

The Endangered Species Act requires private citizens to protect, at their own expense, any "endangered" species of plant, animal or insect that lives or has a "historic range" of living on their property.

The EPA overrules a state's right to develop and implement environmental strategies critical to their economy and environment.

The EPA New Source Review outlaws any industrial equipment modification that may result "in an increase in the emission rate" of an air pollutant.

Pollution Welfare: the proposed idea that since the U.S. economy benefitted from developing earlier than other countries, it should scale back its production (pollution) while other countries increase their production (pollution) to give them a chance to catch up.

* Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE), a regulatory relic from the "energy crisis" of the 1970s intended to minimize fuel consumption, requires automakers to build passenger cars that earn 27.5 mpg, thereby mandating that all cars be constructed lighter and therefore less safe. Now that the energy crisis has ended, CAFE's current purpose is to decrease greenhouse gases.

To obtain a copy of this report, call 703351-4969.

Homeschooling Beats Government Schooling

"Homeschooling: Back to the Future?," a recent study by Elizabeth Lyman of the Cato Institute, finds that "Homeschooling has produced literate students with minimal government interference at a fraction of the cost of any government program." The average annual cost per public school student is $6,994, while the average annual cost per homeschooled student is only $546.

Lyman argues that homeschooling is not a novel, untried idea, but a proven, effective approach that has been around for generations. Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Edison, Andrew Wyeth, Pearl Buck, and many of the Founding Fathers were homeschooled.

The Home School Legal Defense Association maintains that there are currently 1.23 million homeschooled children nationwide. And there has been a boom in the number of homeschooled students accepted at highly selective universities.

Lyman also cites evidence that refutes the claim that homeschooled kids lag behind in social development. In fact, homeschoolers have little difficulty interacting with public school kids and "have consistently fewer behavior problems."

For more information or to obtain a copy of the study, call the Cato Institute at 202842-0200. The study is available online (www.cato.org).

Racial Preferences In Colorado Universities

A Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO) study finds that Colorado's public universities employ racial preferences to artificially increase minority enrollment. In fact, racial preferences were most heavily granted at Colorado's most competitive colleges and universities.

The study finds that "schools using racial preferences routinely reject white and Asian students who have higher test scores and grades than black and Hispanic students who are admitted." At Colorado's four most competitive colleges, about "25% of white rejectees had better qualifications than did the black admittee median." The result is a large gap in the graduation rates between white and minority students.

Proponents of racial preferences claim that without preferences, minority students would be deprived of the opportunity to attend college. But the CEO study refutes this claim, showing that in Colorado, as in most states, "almost every high school graduate" has the opportunity to pursue an advanced degree, "even if no college or university granted preferences."