Dodd-Frank: Obama's other big bad law
By Nicole Gelinas
November 8, 2013
In July 2010, four months after President Obama signed his universal healthcare act into law, he enacted his other signature achievement, the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. Although we haven't paid as much attention to it, Dodd-Frank is as flawed in its own way as Obamacare, with a similar potential to harm ordinary Americans. And the failures have similar origins.
For starters, both Obamacare and Dodd-Frank are too long. Obamacare clocks in at 906 pages; Dodd-Frank is 849 pages. By contrast, the 1965 act creating Medicare ran 138 pages, and the Securities Act of 1933 — a cornerstone of financial regulation that helped prevent meltdowns for five decades — ran just 93 pages.
Length isn't merely an inconvenience. A brick of a law that directs regulators to write more bricks of rules means that neither lawmakers nor the president know exactly what's in the law. Nor do they know how each part of the law eventually will work with — or against — other parts.
Take the president's repeated — and false — promise that any American who wanted to keep his or her health plan could do so. He appears to have genuinely not understood that the voluminous law would lay the groundwork for what we are seeing now: widespread cancellation notices to insured Americans.
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Dodd-Frank and Obamacare have similar problems, but there's a difference. If American healthcare keeps failing, people will be able to tell. They may not be able to do much about it, but at least they'll know. If financial regulation keeps failing, few people will know until the next financial crisis — one that likely would cost millions of jobs, just as the last one did.
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(Much was skipped. Zim.)
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