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Feb. 8, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
55:53
How the government regulates every room in your House: From Shower Heads to Dishwashers
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You wanna listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
I'm glad to have Ben Lieberman on here from Competitive Enterprise Institute.
We're excited on the Doug Collins Show to talk something that I get into.
Maybe you don't, but you should, and that's regulatory issues and how they affect you every day.
What comes out of Washington actually matters.
It actually matters, not just what's in Congress and not the big fights that you always see on TV, but regulatory agencies, regulatory burden, and even things that come from Congress affect you a great deal.
So, Ben, from working on the Hill, you worked on the Hill for a while.
Does it surprise you how much people think that only things happen on Capitol Hill and they forget the regulatory side of this?
Oh, absolutely.
People just don't really know what's going on.
And what's particularly worrisome, and I felt this way during the Obama years, and I feel this way again during the Biden years, there's just so much going on.
It's impossible for people To know everything bad that's coming out of Washington.
And so some pretty troublesome stuff is slipping through and not getting a lot of attention, which is why I wrote the op-ed on a bad regulation for every room in the house.
Homeowners have no idea what's coming their way.
Well, it is.
One of the things that was unique, there's a lot of things of agency work, and we talk about, I always hear this a lot, Ben, from you writing and also being on the Hill, we hear this term loosely called the deep state, and it has nefarious meanings for everybody.
I When people ask me about it, I simply say, look, what you've got in Washington, D.C., we have built a bureaucracy, whatever you want to call it, of Americans who are being paid to do a job.
And Americans typically want to do that job.
They just don't simply take a check, sit in a cubicle and go home.
The problem is, is they're circumventing what most people know as the way laws, regulations, everything comes to be.
And so, at agencies from energy to education to transportation, they're making the extra, if you would, that affect people's lives.
Do you think people...
Here's a curious question.
Do you think people, if they understood how big the federal government is, that it would scare them more?
I don't know if it's just the size, but it's also just how comprehensive the ability of the deep state to affect so many aspects of our lives is.
And I can tell you, I'm a local yokel.
I grew up in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.
So, you know, I wonder, there's probably people in Detroit who hate cars.
There's probably people in Hollywood who hates the movie.
I'm a local Yoko, Washington area person who hates big government.
And, you know, maybe I'm a traitor.
You know, maybe I can say the deep state put me through college.
But, you know, there's actually a few of us here because, you know, this whole idea that inside the Beltway there's greater compassion and greater wisdom to run everybody's lives.
I know that's silly because I've seen it for half a century and how silly it is.
Oh, Ben, we're going to have fun with this podcast today, folks.
You get ready for this one.
So, Ben, let me, I want to just take, you've opened the door here a little bit, and we'll get to regulatory.
So, you're a native D.C.ite, then, huh?
Yes, I am.
And, you know, when I saw my dad going to work every morning, I guess, according to the left, my dad was using his perfect knowledge to selflessly help the American people, like everybody else in the government.
And, I knew in my case, well, my dad was a very smart guy, but in terms of knowing everything, absolutely not.
And he certainly didn't know better than other people how other people should live their lives.
And in terms of selflessly helping the American people, my dad, when he was a GS-13, that's the government rating, His big emphasis was, what do I need to do to make 14?
And when he was a GS-14, what do I need to do to make 15?
And by that time, what do I need to do to have a smooth glide path to retirement?
If every federal employee was as good as my dad, things wouldn't be nearly so bad.
But I saw from the inside that we really ought to have limited government.
The Constitution is right.
We ought to have a government that just focuses on a few things and does them well rather than have regulators pervading every aspect of our lives.
Well, and you've hit something that's really interesting, because I was up in the, and I'm going to show my age a little bit too, I was in college in the 80s, I did an internship on the Hill, worked up there, and this was back in the really dark times of D.C. as a city, as murder, there's a lot of issues going on, and then I, of course, went back in Congress and everything else.
But I'll tell you, over the last 20 years in Washington D.C., in the district itself, the bird, if it was a national bird or a state bird, it would be the equipment crane building buildings in D.C. to house all these people we're talking about.
Well, I know that house shopping in this area, it's amazing how little a million dollars can get you in the Washington, D.C. area in some of the better neighborhoods.
There's obviously a whole lot of people making a lot of money in this town, not doing what you and I did, but doing some of the other things that really rake in the big bucks, playing the game, as we all know.
I had a friend who I know on the hill, as you said, location, sort of everything, but they purchased a home.
It is less than, I'm going to be generous here and say 800 square feet.
It's probably less than that.
And it was a lot of money for that purchase.
It's amazing what you can get, again, in location, location, location.
But yeah, there's a lot of people making a good living in D.C. as we go forward.
Digging into this, and you said something that's interesting.
How hard is it, and we're talking about this, and again, I know like your dad and others who went into work, not necessarily with nefarious motives, but they wanted to get from GS-13 to GS-14.
They wanted to get GS-15.
They either had to write a white paper, they had to come up with a regulation, they had to do something to get there.
This is why it's very difficult in things like education and energy and others that we're discussing, and your household appliances, that these people sitting in cubicles in the D.C. metroplex, not just in D.C., but in Virginia and part of Maryland as well, where did we ever come up with that it was better to be centralized where did we ever come up with that it was better to be centralized in this location than out there with people teachers in the classroom, engineers in the state EPDs and things like that?
Is it developing more or are we becoming more comfortable with it?
I don't know that we're becoming more comfortable with it, but as we mentioned before, I'm not sure the extent of it is known to the public.
And I know it's a big problem for appliances when regulations make appliances not quite as good or more expensive.
The consumer doesn't know why.
They just know they don't like their dishwasher taking forever to finish a load of dishes.
So they don't always know why things are problematic.
You know, nobody reads the Federal Register every morning.
That's the daily compendium of new regulations.
And in fact, it's impossible to keep track of it all.
But again, I think it's that people just don't know how centralized and how pervasive the so-called deep state has become.
Yep.
Well, you've mentioned something here, and I always like to teach, you know, a little bit on this podcast because a lot of people, you know, they're conversant in what I'll call the political ease.
They know what's on the shows, no matter what their flavor is, you know, from liberal to conservative.
They know what the big talking points are.
But things like what we just hit, you mentioned Federal Register.
Most people, if I was to ask them, they go back to the old, you know, schoolhouse rock, how a bill becomes a law, and that's the way they think that they're governed.
The reality is the laws then get turned over to the executive, who then file, you know, regulations and other things that go along with that.
Tell people about that, because back in the Obama administration, these became phone, you know, for those of us who still remember what a phone book is, they became phone book sized in these federal registers.
Talk about the federal register for a second that people may not know about.
Well, it starts out with law, so I'm just a bill, I'm only a bill.
That's correct.
But a lot of these bills say, now, the agency, you fill in the details.
And the big problem is some of these statutes that really just hand over way too much authority.
And particularly, one of the things that I really don't like about these appliance regulations that we'll get into is that what The statutory language, what Congress agreed to, and this was decades ago, is that not only was the Department of Energy going to set regulations, but it had to consider tightening them every six years.
Well, it's always in the agency's interest to never declare a problem solved.
I mean, if the problem's solved, then you can lay everybody off at the agency.
And so if you're saying to the agency, we want you to revisit the current standards and consider tightening them every six years, they're damn well going to do it.
And in fact, for some of these regulations, we're on to the fourth or fifth or sixth round of successively tighter standards with no end in sight.
Maybe for a lot of these regulations, you could say round one wasn't that bad.
And maybe if Congress said to the agency, you can set one set of standards, but no more, maybe things wouldn't be so bad.
But it's these wholesale handovers by Congress of authority to the regulatory agencies.
Essentially, what you end up with is that it's the regulators who write the law because they have such a wide open agenda that they can play around with and they just want to continue doing that forever.
Thank you.
You just hit the problem.
Regulators who then make the law.
And I think this is the important part to look at here.
One of the things is, and I brought this up a lot of times, for people who are trying to maybe grasp their mind around what we're talking about here.
Nancy Pelosi made this famous statement back in 2010. She said, we have to pass it before we know what's in it.
And I was talking about Obamacare.
I have made the argument many times.
She could have read the bill out loud from the speaker's podium, all thousand plus pages of it, and you still would not know what's in it because of these phrases.
And you just hit on it.
The Department of Health and Human Services will define X. The Department of Human Health and Services will promulgate these regulations.
In other words, Congress made a law, but then basically outsourced every bit of the guts of the law that actually would affect us to the agencies of unelected, appointed many times, or career bureaucrats to make things in the dark many ways to have that.
So the statement is, you can know what's in a bill, but if Congress keeps...
Oh, absolutely.
And there's been a few bills out there with ideas to get Congress back in control.
No regulations until they're Specifically approved by Congress.
So, you know, even if Congress years ago gave the agency the regulatory authority, if the rules of a certain size, Congress has to once again approve the rule.
There's all kinds of things that we could do.
There's some good ideas out there that are obviously not going to happen under this administration.
But I think if we have four years of regulatory craziness, I think there'll be an appetite to want to rein that in.
In 2025. Yeah, well Ben, I took over the authorship of the RAINS Act in Congress, which is exactly what you just talked about.
That if it is over a certain amount of economic impact, it had to come back to Congress.
And you know what I was hearing, even from some Republicans, well, we don't have the expertise to know if that's true or not.
I've never in my life seen elected officials willingly give over and say that Congress, and this is what they were saying was, Congress doesn't have the resources to really know what it's doing.
Yeah.
Well, they could say they don't have the resources.
The problem is the regulators don't have the incentives to get it right.
They have the incentives to overregulate.
And I would also add that there's plenty of regulators who want things to be as complicated as possible because then they leave the agency and become consultants.
And get paid big bucks to try to explain to manufacturers exactly what it all means.
So it's a very insidious thing.
It very much is.
Well, before we get into the house by house, we're going to go room by room.
Folks, if you're listening today, this is going to be fun.
We're going to go room by room in your house talking about regulations that cause...
I love how Ben described here just a few minutes ago.
Why your dishwasher takes three hours to wash a load of dishes.
Why your faucets...
Spit out water instead of actually have some pressure to them.
There's some things we're going to talk about.
But before we get there, though, I want to talk just for a second, and I think you will understand what I'm going here.
In Congress, when I was a congressman, I used to get calls from businesses all the time on two specific agencies that were started with, I will say, the right intentions, but have grown outside their scope.
And that's OSHA and MSHA, Occupational Safety and Health, Mind Safety and Health.
One of the things is, no one would argue that if you have an OSHA, this occupational safety to keep people safe in businesses, that, okay, fine, if that's what you're wanting to do, but they should be a helping agency, not a punitive agency.
And what has happened over the years is, instead of saying, here's the best work prospect for your business to keep your employees safe, because I don't know of any business owner who wakes up every day and says, hey, I want to go into my plant today and kill people.
They don't do that, okay?
But OSHA has become a punitive, sort of like what we talked about, how's the next rung on level?
Well, they'll go in, if they see something wrong, they fine you, write you up, no chance, and then if you don't fix it, then they come up and make it even worse.
Is it possible, Ben, that we can get back to where some of these agencies, especially the ones that have the punitive power, to where they can get back to helping businesses instead of being viewed as a shakedown many times to the businesses?
I don't have a lot of confidence that these agencies won't just get worse in time.
I think it really comes down to things like the RAINS Act.
It really comes down to limiting the authority of the regulatory agencies.
The regulators, the bureaucrats, knew what it was like to run a business and knew what it was like to sign the front of a paycheck.
They would understand things better, but that's not the class of people that you get at these regulatory agencies.
I just don't have a lot of confidence that you can give agencies a lot of authority and they'll use it judiciously.
I think you just have to rein in the authority with things like the RAINS Act.
Well, and I think the RAINS Act was, you know, even then we were talking about, you know, billions of dollars.
We weren't even talking about the things that, you know, trying to bring it back to Congress.
But it also showed the RAINS Act, and I'm glad we brought this up.
The RAINS Act actually showed also the very lethargic nature or actually inactive nature of Congress at this point to actually deal with the minutiae of government.
And I think this is why...
It's easy for us in Congress, and I was there, I saw it happen, to pass big spending bills, to pass continuing resolutions, because we don't deal anymore in the minutia of government.
We don't actually have hearings on the scope and size of these agencies.
In fact, many of them are supposed to be renewed or are authorized again, if you would, and they just keep going on and on in perpetuity.
I think podcasts like this, your writings, others, are hopefully going to raise the awareness to say that, look, if we're going to rein in, so to speak, using the analogy as we go forward here, these agencies, Congress has got to get back to doing more than one bill a week or more than one hearing a week on the hot flavor topic that's going on in the media.
There are real things out there that affect real people's lives, and they feel helpless to do anything about it, and Congress has sort of fed that.
Yeah, and another thing I would mention is federalism.
The federal government's trying to do too much.
Some of what we talk about, you mentioned OSHA, that can best be handled at the state level.
Some other issues can actually be handled at the county level.
But so much is being done by Congress.
It's impossible, as you know, for a Congress member to be an expert on every last subject that Congress concerns itself with these days.
But if we saw less The topics being handled at the federal government, the ones that Constitution actually gives the federal government, and more push down to the levels of government closer to where things are going on, I think that helps a lot, too.
There's two areas that I see that just completely, and one is in EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, and the other one is in education.
There's not a state in the union that does not have an education department.
There's not a state in the union that doesn't have its own state-run environmental protection.
At best, on the national level, you have small, small agencies who give best practices.
Here's how you do it.
Funnel the money for programs that come out of the federal government.
Again, a tenth of the size of what they are now.
Because these agencies, this federalism that you just spoke of, I would want the state of Georgia's Environmental Protection Division, who understands the state of Georgia or the Virginia or the Montana, to deal with those instead of it being...
Because what most businesses get hit with is a duality.
They'll get hit with the federal and the state level many times.
You're absolutely right.
There's a lot to be said for the old cliche, one size does not fit all.
And so we want the federal government dealing with truly federal issues, and many of these things are not.
And I would include applying standards there.
Well, I think so.
Well, let's dig into some of this.
And I'm going to do it sort of like you did an op-ed on this, and we're going to sort of take it as you did it.
Let's start in the room that so many people spend a lot of time in.
It's one of my favorite rooms, and that is the kitchen.
Where has the fingers of government drawn us in the kitchen?
Well, just about every energy and water-using appliance in your house is regulated for energy efficiency and water efficiency by the Department of Energy.
And as I mentioned, they've been doing this for decades.
They've been tightening the standards.
The law says you have to revisit the standards, but you can only change them on the side of making them more stringent.
The DOE doesn't have the authority to say, we went too far the last time.
It's one of those, it's an Allen wrench, the ones that only tighten.
You know, and that's what we have.
One of the problems, probably the most common problem, is the new ultra-efficient dishwashers take longer to do the job.
So efficiency with regard to people's time doesn't count for anything.
And so if you were wondering why your dishwasher 20 years ago got it done in an hour, where dishwashers today take two hours or more, It's because of these standards.
Now the Trump Department of Energy actually tried to add a little flexibility so that we could go back to the faster dishwashers.
They started that process.
They couldn't finish it in time.
And now the Biden Department of Energy is trying to undo that.
So that's what's going on with dishwashers.
Now there's whole new rounds of appliances standards for other things.
One of the things to worry about is the war on natural gas.
The environmentalists hate natural gas.
Because it's a greenhouse gas and global warming and they don't like Homeowners using natural gas, and as your listeners know, certain appliances like heaters, like clothes dryers, like water heaters, and stoves come in natural gas and electric versions.
And when it comes to stoves, people swear by natural gas.
I'm not much of a cook, but people who are good cooks and kitchen chefs, they swear by natural gas, but there's a big push there.
Away from natural gas use to electricity and so that may have an impact in the kitchen and then things everything from as big as your refrigerator and as small as your microwave oven has efficiency standards and they're more in the works and every time they raise the upfront cost maybe more so than you actually save in energy so just about everything in the kitchen that plugs in or I'll mention that the Biden Department of Energy is even tinkering with the message for testing
compliance with faucets to see if they're not using too much water.
And it doesn't even make much sense.
If you're making a pot of spaghetti, you've got to fill up the pot.
If the faucet is slower, it just takes more time.
You're not going to be saving any water.
But nonetheless, there actually are federal water use limits for faucets and for toilets and for showers.
Yeah, we'll get to those in just a second.
I want to get back into this as well.
Is there not a hypocrisy that just is put on hold, especially when you deal with the natural gas?
Because, I mean, I like to cook.
I'm not as good as my wife.
My wife loves to cook, and she's very good at it.
We, in our last home, we made the switch to gas, and I won't go back as far as cooking.
It's immediate.
You get the heat.
For me, it's just I just enjoy cooking with it.
And now you're having this, as you talked about, this move toward, let's go back to all electric.
While at the same point in time, realizing that most of the electric, because they're so against nuclear, they're so against these others, that you have gas-powered energy plants, you have coal-fired energy plants, you have these others.
The wind, solar, and all cannot make up the difference.
Do they ever stop to think about the hypocrisy in those kind of statements?
No.
You know, people tell me, you know, the environmentalists won't do that because it would be hypocritical.
Well, they're half right.
A lot of things the environmentalists do are hypocritical, but they do it all the time, you know.
Claiming that climate change is a big problem, but then not turning around and supporting nuclear, which is emissions-free, is one example of that.
And here you're talking about a real double whammy.
You have people pushing, you know, towards more electricity use, that if we're going to be using less natural gas in our home, it's going to...
We're going to need more electricity.
They're doing the same thing for cars as well.
As you know, the Biden administration is trying to push everybody away from gasoline, diesel-powered cars to electric cars.
So you're creating greater demand for electricity.
At the same time, you're closing off the best options for producing electricity, coal, nuclear, even natural gas, as we mentioned.
They don't want it to be used to generate electricity either.
So you're putting a bigger strain on the electricity system Demanding more electricity from that system.
At the same time, you're putting a lot of constraints on that system.
So it absolutely is hypocrisy, and something's got to give.
Well, I mean, again, I live in North Georgia.
I mean, we get our one to two inches of snow a year.
I did not think there was another place that reacted as badly to the threat of snow until I started working in Washington, D.C. And I now find out that there's a place in the world that actually reacts as badly to snow or threat of snow, not real snow, but threat of snow is North Georgia.
But, you know, if you start continuing this push down and what you just brought up was something important, the grid is something we talk about from a national security interest.
We talk about it from just a lifestyle interest as well.
If you're pushing more and more toward electric and you have, you know, weather conditions, you have power outages, you're leaving these kitchens and many times heating and cooling to People are just stuck.
They don't have anything.
Whereas if you have a gas stove, you can at least cook something or heat up some water.
Again, it is amazing to me how they're seemingly running you down an alley in which there's only one way out.
We're putting all our eggs in one basket.
Well, we're making that basket riskier and less reliable.
So you're absolutely right.
And again, one thing the environmentalists don't do a very good job of and their allies in Congress is thinking things through.
And when you think this through, you see a lot of problems.
Again, demanding more of our grid at the same time that you're taking the best and most reliable and most affordable sources of electricity away from the grid.
Something's got to give, as I mentioned.
Well, and we're going to jump around, not necessarily to the kitchen, but we're going to hit the basement.
We talked about gas and the use in furnaces, water heaters, also those kind of things.
Another area that is, and I have a son who works in planting and doing HVAC and other things like that.
I don't think people realize, I mean, if you're pushing toward heat pumps, you're pushing toward even electric, the coolants and the other things that are involved in that, how expensive they have become.
And my son looked at a unit, he was looking to buy a house the other day, and he looked at the HVAC system and he said, you know, somebody said it was new.
He said, this isn't new.
He said three years ago they banned this refrigerant.
And he said, now to fix it, it's going to, you know, to refigure the system, cost exponentially more.
How do we, I mean, again, it seems like they do it incrementally so that people don't notice.
But this area right here with refrigerant, coolant, and things like that is another area, not of Congress, but of regulatory, correct?
Well, Congress gave the regulatory authority to EPA, so there's plenty of blame to go around in Washington, as you know.
Yeah.
I'd say there's almost a war on air conditioning.
It might be death by a thousand cuts, but there's some serious things going on here.
For whatever reason, and I mentioned in my op-ed, you know, the regulators all work in very nicely, well-air-conditioned buildings.
I've been in them, and you know, the halls of Congress are all nicely air-conditioned.
But that doesn't stop Washington from messing with everybody else's air conditioner.
And one of the things that's going on is they decided that the refrigerant used...
In most home air conditioners that that's a chemical that we have to start restricting and the price for that has gone up.
So if your air conditioner leaks refrigerant, which is a common occurrence as your son will probably tell you, getting replacement refrigerant is going to cost a lot more.
In addition, These efficiency standards are also hitting air conditioning systems as well.
So, you know, sometimes, you know, a billion-dollar regulation from one agency, a billion-dollar regulation from another agency, the cost may be more than $2 billion because each regulation makes it harder to comply with the others, and it becomes a really, really complicated, difficult thing for manufacturers to meet them.
And I have to say, I don't always side with the manufacturers on these because sometimes they support these regulations because they think it kind of skews the market towards the more expensive model.
So unfortunately, the manufacturers are not always on the same side as the consumer.
I understand.
Well, let's take this out a little bit further because I think it's something that's necessary because you talked about the progression of each year or every six-year cycle, it has to get a little more stringent, okay?
There are certain things, and I've been a part of this dealing in water quality, air quality, you know, we're talking about emissions testing, these kind of things, to where they're really right now, and I'll use one, phosphates in water, okay?
This is, again, your water supply and your local area.
Governments have to deal with this.
They have to test what they put back into the water flow.
Especially on some of these chemicals, phosphates, other things that they're looking for, the number now that they have to meet, put out by EPA or put out by others in the regulatory world, are at levels that cannot be measured realistically.
But yet they continue to use these standards that can't be measured realistically and then turning around and fining governments because they can't measure what they've been given as a falsehood.
How can we bring that to light and fix this?
Because you can't just continue to make something either monitoring less, more efficient, and it still actually work.
Well, yeah, fortunately, there's a lot of examples like that.
Another one is air pollution limits.
You know, there's a small amount of natural pollutants in the air, and some of the air pollutant limits from EPA are very close to, if not, where you would get natural pollution.
You know, like you have the Smoky Mountains.
That smoke has been there for centuries.
That's a normal amount of haze.
And we're getting down to these levels where you're at background levels or you're at levels that...
Even with the most sensitive instruments are statistically indistinguishable from zero.
And again, it's things like the RAINS Act.
It's things like not letting agencies just to continue to tighten the screws, which as we've seen, they'll do even though it doesn't make sense.
And that is true.
So, I mean, we deal with industries, you know, and I'm not going to use, you know, silicate is one of the biggest issues you have in brick, you have it in granite, you have it in all these.
And there's been a regulatory push to monitor it down to basically levels that...
Are less than the background in the air currently, but yet they're forcing industries to monitor, protect, aspirate, respirators and everything else to areas that are actually below what is in many times ambient air.
This is the kind of things, and I'm going to put this in perspective, and you can elaborate on it if you like.
This is what people don't understand when you especially have manufacturing industries, brick, granite, these other things, mining, is this costs jobs at the end of the day.
This is an issue that, you know, if you talk about supply chain issues, well, if you don't have the workers because you can't afford, because you're having to put in everything else, this affects our economy, not just in the fact you're having to deal with it, but in the fact that businesses either can't stay open or they have to spend money other places besides the workers to do it.
Oh, absolutely.
And I got to say, I'm a free trader for the most part.
I believe in global trade.
But when we're hampering domestic production, when we're disadvantaging domestic production, and meanwhile, producers in China or other countries have very little or any environmental restrictions, that's an unfair advantage.
And that's something that...
That we really need to be concerned about.
You're right.
These regulations chase away jobs.
You hear a lot about offshoring of jobs.
Well, let's talk about regulatory offshoring of jobs.
Well, and one of the things that you look at, and I go back to a time in the Obama administration when they signed the quote, you know, the big bill.
Ballyhooed agreement with China on emissions, on global warming.
They were a big discussion.
And basically, it was front-loaded for the Americans.
For us, we had to meet certain criterias, close certain plants.
But yet, China worked into the deal that they would, and it was touted as this great achievement, that by 2030, they would roll back or stop production of their coal-fired energy plants.
The funny part about it was, is 2030 was in their, that was the end of their next round of their planning and building.
So basically they're going to build everything they want to build up to 2030. And we call that a victory while we were actually taking jobs and energy off the market.
This is the part that to me, at some point has to be exposed.
People have to understand this is not all about the show.
It's about the actual effect on the economy and people's lives.
Oh, absolutely.
And with regard to China, you're right.
China actually was able to increase their emissions till 2030. And then after 2030 were these vague promises to do something about it.
And I point out that the same people counting pollution in China are the same people who count zero emissions.
Human rights violations in China.
So can we really count their numbers?
Now, I wouldn't accuse the environmentalists of being pro-China per se, but that's the end result.
And it's really hard to understand why this If climate change is a problem, it doesn't matter if the emissions come from the U.S. or China.
And right now, China out-emits the U.S. by a wide margin, and there's almost no concern about those emissions.
The environmentalists, for whatever reason, they have these blinders on and they only want to hurt the U.S. economy.
Exactly.
And we haven't even got into India.
We haven't even got into some of the other growing industrial sides that are just basically ignored in this.
Alright, let's come back to our house.
And one of the things that I... We talked about the conditions in our dishwasher.
I'll share a personal example.
We bought a new dishwasher about a year ago.
I guess maybe six months or a year ago.
Very quiet.
Very nice.
We replaced one.
I went down the other day...
And I kept having to open it up because I thought it was broken.
It was like two and a half hours later was still, you know, rolling.
So we're getting this efficiency standard maybe is for something else besides actual people efficiency.
But the place that bothers me the most, and the Trump administration, Donald Trump in particular, talked about two things that seemed to really get under regulatory skin and especially environmental skin.
Number one was the light bulb.
The incandescent light bulb or the move toward light bulbs.
The other one was the water coming out of the shower and the shower head.
The toilets are there as well.
The low flow toilets, we get that.
Talk to the people about why you have your shower heads that don't come out as well.
And also, frankly, you have these issues How this came about and why they were sitting on the light bulbs and everything else, how this affects everyday living.
Well, one of the things that's really a big problem is when Congress does a really big bill, as you mentioned with Nancy Pelosi, you don't know what's in there.
And in a huge 1992 energy bill, there were these water efficiency standards for toilets and showers and faucets.
I think a lot of Republicans just signed on.
They didn't know what was in there.
Maybe they'd like some of the other things, maybe...
Maybe people liked it.
It brought a few dollars back to their stay, whatever it was.
Then it took effect and then suddenly we have the low flush toilets.
We're a big problem for a while.
There's also this requirement that showers only use a certain amount of water.
The only saving grace there is you can actually kind of tinker around with the shower head so more water comes out, but it's kind of silly that That the standards are there in the first place.
And one of the things the Trump administration did is there was one way to get around the standard and that you could have those showers.
You ever seen showers with more than one shower head?
The way the law was originally written, it was water use per showerhead.
So you could have two showerheads if you wanted more water.
To me, if somebody wants more water and they're willing to pay their water bills, that's their business.
And the Trump administration allowed that limited opportunity for heavier flow showers, these multiple shower heads.
But then the Biden administration is coming in and said, no, you can't have multiple shower heads.
No matter how many shower heads, they have to add up to the limit.
And so the only good news is you can tinker with the shower heads to get more water to come out.
But you can't get these multi-shower heads that give you a really big flow.
But, you know, again, you know, why should the government even be in this business?
I mean, that's the part.
I mean, because if I have a slower outputting showerhead, it's going to take me longer.
I mean, I'm a big guy.
I mean, it's going to take me longer, you know, pretty much to do what I want us to rinse off, do those kinds of things.
If I can get in and get out, I'm also a military guy.
I know how to take a two-minute shower.
I mean, but I got to have enough water to get stuff on and off as we go here.
Look...
What else in the house?
I know the garage.
You know, we talked about that.
We talked about air conditioning.
We talked about the garage.
What are some other things around the house that we've not spoke of that where people can, whether they realize it or not, can point to the government's interference or government regulation are causing them to have to spend more money?
Well, I think we've covered a number of them, and you mentioned the car right now.
There's a bunch of carrots and sticks to try to push everybody towards electric vehicles, and there's new standards coming out from EPA that are especially going to be hard on larger gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles, pickup trucks and SUVs especially.
So you got that going on.
You know, I mentioned the light bulb.
There's been a real attempt to target the incandescent light bulb, and originally the substitute was going to be these compact fluorescent bulbs, which nobody liked, and in fact are disappearing from the market.
Now these LED bulbs have come along, and they're good.
But I still think, you know, that they do cost more.
They do have certain disadvantages.
They're not as good for dimming.
And when you think about it, every light fixture around your house has a different purpose, a different pattern of use.
So why not let the widest availability, the widest variety of light bulbs be available?
There's nothing wrong with keeping light bulbs open.
The incandescent lightbulbs on the market.
Yes, they use more energy than the incandescents, but they work better for certain purposes.
And again, this ought to be the consumer's choice.
And I think it kind of rubs a lot of folks the wrong way when they hear that the incandescent lightbulb Is being targeted.
Americans don't like being told what they can and cannot have.
And that's really, I think, at the core of how we're going to fight back against these appliance regulations.
Well, and I'm glad you used that term feedback.
Before we get to some solutions, you know, how we look at this long-term, I want to hit something.
This sort of came up a great deal in this conversation.
We've addressed it a little bit, but I want to go back to it here for just a minute for people to understand this.
If you're out there and you're pushing, and it is interesting, you're pushing everything toward electrical, you're putting everything toward batteries, uh, Ben, do you see something here?
I'm getting more and more concerned.
What is this endgame with electrical?
That our grids in many areas are not capable of handling a great deal more surge.
Knowing that the more you restrict natural gas and the more you restrict coal-fired plants, the less output energy you're going to have.
By not having nuclear, you're laying it off the option, which even some of the most environmental conscious countries in the world, Europe and others, are heavily reliant on nuclear energy.
I mean, I'm concerned about it in the sense of, you know, if we're moving this, you know, more and more away, are we headed toward a disaster?
Because I don't hear anybody talking about, you know, how do we make more energy except in areas like solar and wind and other things that are just not going to be able to keep up with this demand.
I don't know if people are taking enough of a look at the endgame here, where this all leads to, because it's very scary.
And it's not hypothetical anymore.
We're already seeing some of these problems in Europe.
Energy costs this winter in Europe have gone through the roof.
Let's give the Europeans credit.
They did us a favor by moving a little faster than the U.S. So we're seeing the results, and the results are low-income folks throughout Europe are really struggling to keep the heat on this winter.
Countries have moved away from coal-fired generation, moved away from nuclear, not every European country.
Now Russia starts rattling their sabers, and these countries are even more dependent on them, so they really can't stand in the way of Russian aggression.
And that's something we also haven't talked about.
When you reduce energy independence, you increase energy.
Your geopolitical dependence on others who have that energy.
Beyond the consumer impacts, there's the national security and geopolitical impacts as well.
Europeans really struggling to keep the lights on and keep the heat on.
Russia, you know, they have natural gas and they can threaten to turn off or on the valve and use that as a geopolitical weapon.
And I think we're seeing in Europe where we would go if we continued down this road.
Yeah, and I'm glad you brought that up, Ben, because that is a real issue.
One of the things that, you know, I remember when I first went to Congress, and when I first was there, I was sworn in in 2013, it was the last four years, it was the second term of the Obama administration, moving into the, then I was there through the Trump administration.
The interesting part was, I remember back in 2013, 2014, we talked about growth in the American economy, that we knew we had the best ideas, the best products, we knew we had the best workers.
One of the big areas that we were lacking is the cost side of it, and energy was one of the largest costs in that.
And if we became energy independent instead of energy dependent, that makes a big difference.
We saw that actually play out during the Trump administration, where we actually did see that.
We saw manufacturing coming back.
We saw a lot.
Now we seem to be, as you said, Europe showing this way, but it's also empowering those who have the energy to control the game.
Did it bother you, and again, in this regulatory sphere, but energy is the big component here.
Did it bother you that when you started hearing the reverse, when the Biden administration started basically begging OPEC to help us out when we were sort of cutting back on our own?
You didn't know whether to laugh or to cry.
It was that crazy.
And I remind people, the Biden administration on Inauguration Day killed the Keystone XL pipeline.
And presidents send a strong message by what they do on day one.
And his message for domestic energy, or I should say North American energy, is don't even bother with natural gas or coal or petroleum because you'll have an enemy in the White House that will stop you every step of the way.
And they did other things.
They tried to stop oil and gas leasing on federal lands, but they lost in court on that.
But now they're dragging their feet on the leasing.
And so, yes, they're saying no to American energy, and then they're turning around when prices get high.
They're scapegoating big oil and that.
But they're also, strangely enough, they see more okay with OPEC oil and Russian natural gas than they are with American oil and natural gas.
It makes no sense.
But that's the situation we're in right now.
One of the things I would say that the Biden administration, they want high gasoline prices, but they don't want anybody to blame them for high gasoline prices.
And so that's part of the craziness.
They want to do these things, but they don't want the political fingerprints for having done them.
Well, and that's one of the things that is just, again, amazing to me.
Again, it's this duplicity or hypocrisy, however you want to put it, when we deal with regulatory burdens that burden the American people.
We're not even going to get into inflation and the causes there.
Let's switch gears here a little bit here.
I was amazed, even as someone coming into Congress, at how much power...
You know, you always hear about it, but you don't really grasp it until you get there and you sort of start saying...
The bureaucratic power of the executive.
I believe, and I've said this before, Ben, I believe that our democracy, for whatever people want to call the problem, I think the biggest problem we have in democracy in our constitutional republic right now is that Congress has abdicated a great deal of its authority to the executive branch.
In other words, the executive has become sort of the lump in the wheel instead of it being the three branches.
You have Congress, which is important.
You have the judicial, which is important.
But the executive has taken on a great deal of what most people know are outsized of their role.
How can we get not only the American public, but members of Congress to understand the real fact that they're not in control unless they start having oversight and better input into some of these regulatory burdens?
Well, I think you hit the nail on the head.
And one thing that Republicans need to think about doing is not just winning back the House and the Senate, but what they want to do once they've done so.
And I think that's where we really need to see this focus on some of these, you know, kitchen table or I should say kitchen dishwasher type issues.
I think one of the reasons why I've looked at appliances is because it's indicative of what's wrong with a regulatory state, but it's an example where every consumer can relate.
And so many regulations that that's not the case.
So we need to really focus on these ones.
That directly and adversely impact consumers to get the public focused on this and to get them to understand because, let's face it, there are people in denial that there is a deep state on both sides of the country.
Of the aisle.
Well, and I think some of the craziness with three-hour dishwashers, it's not just important to fix the dishwasher regulations, but I think it's a good way to educate the public and educate members of Congress that there's some real problems with a regular story state that's gone too far and a but I think it's a good way to educate the public and educate members of Congress that there's some real problems with a regular story state that's gone too far and a real
Be it legislation or regulation.
I think you're exactly right because at the end of the day, Congress can never sidestep its responsibility that it is the fact that it is the branch in which the government is funded.
It is the branch in which you start the budget process, you end the budget process, the president either agrees or disagrees.
But at the end of the day, the executive branch has to live with whatever Congress has appropriated from the financial till.
And if you're cutting that back, then you're able to see this.
And again, I think it's a bigger problem because at the end of the day, you've got members who look at it and say, well, our Appropriated spending is less than six cents on a dollar and it's not worth our time and it's easier just to go out and talk about bigger issues.
I think the problem is going to come in and is in the future, it is this dependence on government and lack of oversight of these regulatory issues that you and I have been talking about that are going to be the things that end up causing the biggest concern in our economy and our growth that would lead to us to be weakened in the future.
I think you're absolutely right.
What we're talking about here is just one example or set of examples of a much larger issue with the size and scope of government, the lack of accountability and the devolution of authority to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats.
We can only hope, and I think Trump recognized this probably more than any other president since Reagan.
He recognized that there was a problem with the size and scope of Washington, and we need to see more of that, not just from any one politician, but from a number of them.
Yeah, it's got to be from the executive and the Congress.
They both have to see the same problem.
And I think, you know, for me, I think Donald Trump saw it because he actually lived it in a sense.
Reagan saw it from a different perspective, you know, growing through, you know, his time in corporate world and movies.
But Donald Trump, you know, again, without, you know, talking about anything else, from where he came from, the building industry, I mean, we hadn't even got into that, you know, that kind of regulatory burden that you find on buildings and inspections and everything else.
He saw it, you know, firsthand.
Yeah, with all his hotels and property honings, he probably owned 10,000 showers and who knows how many air conditioners.
So he liked to have fun with this issue, but he probably knew more about this than any other White House occupant.
Well, I think that's why you saw that Federal Register that we talked about earlier in the podcast going from the size of a phone book down to where it was barely a leaflet a lot in the Trump administration.
Because one of the things that they said was he told agencies that they went from this policy, if you make one, you've got to take off some.
And so it just got to be the point where regulatory agencies said...
Because this is the part that I have, and except for Congress giving them the authority to update the regulations every number of years, I see a great deal of problems, and they can put out a lot of regulation, but the oversight for them is many times very much lacking, but yet causes problems because of the fear of the possibility of getting sidetracked with the regulatory agencies.
Yeah, and one thing we don't see is agencies looking back to see, did past regulations work out as well as we had hoped?
Were the benefits as high as we claimed?
Were the costs as low as we had claimed?
And that's another thing we should be doing a great deal more of, is kicking the tires of the track record.
Exactly.
Wow, isn't that an interesting concept almost that every family in the world does, every small business in the world does?
It says, hey, what worked this past year for us and what didn't work?
The only place it doesn't apply is the federal government.
Mistakes get rewarded in Washington DC. Ben, thanks for being a part of this.
It's been a fun podcast today and look forward to touching base with you over the time.
As we keep people up to date and hopefully current members of Congress and new members of Congress listening to something like this and saying, hey, what can we do to rein back in this power?
So Ben, thanks for being with us on the Doug Collins Podcast.
Well, thank you.
Washington's so dirty, I think I need to take another shower.
Well, it'll be a little bit slower this time.
We appreciate it.
Ben, thanks a bunch.
Thank you.
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