The president’s recent proposal to increase the minimum wage to $9.00 is not the way to help low-income households. Raising the minimum wage is more likely to increase unemployment for some of the least skilled American workers and further impede a historically slow recovery. Research from the Mercatus Center shows that regulatory reform would help low-income families without causing more unemployment or slowing the recovery.

The concern that American businesses are overly burdened by regulations has legitimate grounds. In 2011, American companies had to comply with over 1 million federal regulatory restrictions, compared with about 860,000 a decade earlier.[1] However, to truly address concerns about overregulation, policy makers cannot focus exclusively on the growth of new regulations. Attention must also be paid to the lack of an efficient and effective regulatory review process for preexisting rules.

In the recent Mercatus Center study, “Overriding Consumer Preferences with Energy Regulation,” Ted Gayer, co-director of the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution, and W. Kip Viscusi, University Distin- guished Professor of Law, Economics, and Management at Vanderbilt, examined the economic justification for recent U.S. energy regulations proposed by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The study found that the energy-efficiency standards have a relatively minor effect on greenhouse-gas emissions, and—per the regulating agencies’ own estimates—cannot pass cost-benefit analyses based on their environmental benefits alone. To justify these regulations, the agencies relied on estimated benefits derived from correcting consumer “irrationality.”…

In recent years, federal agencies have issued energy-efficiency standards for everything from cars to light bulbs. These regulations are commonly billed as important efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. But, according to a new study published by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, the standards have a negligible effect on emissions.