The Globe reports today that Charlie Baker’s decision to showcase one Joseph M. DiStasio, a businessman from Quincy who recently declared bankruptcy, as the sympathetic victim of the destructive power of state regulations on Massachusetts businesses may have been another backfire by the Baker campaign engine. Judging, for example, by the fine imposed by the Attorney General’s office on Mr. DiStasio’s companies for cheating their employees out of $268,000 of wages, Charlie may have had Ebenezer Scrooge on the platform with him instead of Tiny Tim.
Which raises other questions about that extremely large (and equally vague) anti-regulatory plank in the Baker platform. To say, as the Globe does today, that the Baker campaign has “provided few details” about the specific regulations that resulted in the bankruptcy of his poster child’s business is an understatement.
For example, what happened to Weld Administration’s announcement on January 2, 1997, that the the regulatory monster had been slain, with Charlie in the role of St. George? New Year Sees State Slashing Red Tape (sub. req.)
The sun set yesterday on the 20,000-page Massachusetts rulebook, as the commonwealth peeled back its red tape for the first time ever.
After 90 years of uninterrupted growth, including a 750 percent increase in regulations since 1970, the bulky Code of Massachusetts Regulations has been cut down a peg.
Gov. William F. Weld’s administration axed or streamlined about half its 1,600 regulations effective Jan. 1, on subjects ranging from workplace safety to dry cleaning to bowling alleys, in a massive effort to limit the reach of government into daily life…..
“This is the new world,” said Charles D. Baker Jr., Weld’s secretary of administration and finance. “It’s always been more and more regulation, every single year. We’re trying to put a better face on government.”
With the presumably granular knowledge of state regulations that this 1997 exercise suggests, it’s surprising that Baker has so far been so vague about what he means by regulatory reform. The only example of regulatory abuse he identifies in his list of govnerment reforms concerns the new “combined reporting” tax law, which is primarily a statutory change, not a regulatory one. It would seem either that the dragon slaying of 1997 lacked the legendary glow the Weld Administration gave it at the time, or that Charlie’s imagination is so impoverished that he’s still fighting the last war.
