Congressional Democrats have been squabbling with the Bush Administration over the need for reform in the credit card industry. Folks like House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank and Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Chairman Christopher Dodd are touting legislation, while the Administration favors less stringent industry oversight through regulatory changes. We got a [...]

The SBA Office of Advocacy was able to save small businesses about $2.5 billion in regulatory compliance costs during fiscal 2007, according to its annual report to Congress on enforcement of the Regulatory Flexibility Act. The report was released last week with a certain amount of hoopla, as this year it included its Top Ten [...]

A recently released research report by Scott Wallsten, vice president for research and senior fellow with iGrowth Global, finds that unbundling rules alone do not promote broadband penetration and, in some cases, actually depress infrastructure investment. However, he also finds that rules that both provide new entrants with access to the incumbent’s infrastructure, while minimizing [...]

One of the highlights of January in Washington took place last week when IRS National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olsen issued her annual report to Congress for the 2007 tax year. Olsen is still grousing about the tax gap, although she is more focused on administrative adjustments the IRS could make to address the problem rather [...]

More than eighty federal regulations have been nominated for review by concerned small business owners and small business advocates as a part of the SBA Office of Advocacy’s Regulatory Review and Reform initiative, the agency announced last week. The initiative, nicknamed r3, is another plank of President Bush’s effort to reduce regulatory burdens for small [...]

It has been almost seven long years but the SBA has finally published a set of proposed rules to implement the Women’s Procurement Program that has been a bone of contention for six of them. Unfortunately, the SBA studied the RAND Corporation’s research and came to the conclusion that there were only four relatively obscure [...]