More on the "regulatory cliff"

Yep:

Even if President Obama and John Boehner work out a deal to avoid the "fiscal cliff," the U.S. is still careening toward a another cliff, thanks to Obama's massively expensive, if little noticed, regulatory agenda.

As IBD reported before the election, Obama's regulatory minions had temporarily put several costly new rules on ice to protect the president from charges that he was anti-business and to shield the economy from the effects of all these huge new regulatory burdens.

But almost as soon as voters decided to give Obama four more years, his regulators once again sprang into action.

Or as the AP put it, "Since the election, the Obama administration has quietly reopened the regulations pipeline."

It is exhausting just to read the laundry list of new regulations pouring out of every significant federal agency, now that the election is behind us. Since almost all rules benefit large companies at the expense of their smaller competitors, the consequences après le déluge are entirely predictable, even if politicians and the reporters who reprint their talking points will describe them as "unintended": Large companies will capture the regulatory apparatus to entrench themselves, and our economy will become less competitive, more sclerotic, and the feedback loop between Washington and the multinationals will only grow stronger.