In the Wall Street Journal, Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) found an interesting way to describe the regulatory environment. Playing off the impending fiscal cliff, automatic tax increases and spending cuts set to take effect in 2013, Portman warns of an impending “regulatory cliff”:

After three years of bureaucratic excess, the Obama administration has been quietly postponing several multibillion-dollar regulations until after the November election. Those delayed rules, together with more than 130 unfinished mandates under the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial law, could significantly increase the regulatory drag on our economy in 2013.

One of those postponed regulations Portman mentions is EPA’s Ozone Rule that the agency says will cost $90 billion yearly.

After reading Sen. Portman’s piece I’m sure you’ll want to learn more about how the federal regulatory system functions, take a look at the new edition of Regulation: A Primer put out by George Mason University’s Mercatus Center and George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center. It’ll be part of my late-summer reading.