The United States established one of its first true consumer protection laws in 1872, when it protected consumers from fraud involving the use of U.S. mail. But the modern era of consumer protection didn’t begin for another 90 years, when President John F. Kennedy delivered remarks to Congress that established four basic consumer rights — rights to safety, to choice, to be informed, and to be heard — and laid the groundwork for the consumer protections Americans expect and depend upon today.

Kennedy’s remarks, delivered 50 years ago today, argued that protecting consumers was vital to the stability of the American economy and the country’s national interest:

If consumers are offered inferior products, if prices are exorbitant, if drugs are unsafe or worthless, if the consumer is unable to choose on an informed basis, then his dollar is wasted, his health and safety may be threatened, and the national interest suffers.

Kennedy’s four basic consumer rights led to the establishment of the Consumer Product Safety Commission and to the passing of anti-trust, patent, and price gouging laws, as well as the creation of non-governmental actors like the Better Business Bureau to protect consumer rights.

While Americans take many of these protections for granted, they are often under assault from business interests and lawmakers. Regulatory agencies from the Food and Drug Administration to the Securities and Exchange Commission have been subjected to drastic budget cuts, as well as repeated efforts to prevent them from passing new regulations or enforcing those that already exist.

Those same efforts are now focused on the newest consumer protection agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. President Obama appointed the CFPB’s first director in January, after more than a year of Republican promises that they would block his nominee. Despite those efforts, the CFPB is already helping consumers in numerous ways, primarily by taking steps to prevent and remedy the predatory, discriminatory, and potentially illegal financial practices that were prevalent during the housing crisis.

“The federal Government — by nature the highest spokesman for all the people — has a special obligation to be alert to the consumer’s needs and to advance the consumer’s interests,” Kennedy said. “Their voice is not always as loudly heard in Washington as the voices of smaller and better-organized groups–nor is their point of view always defined and presented. But under our economic as well as our political form of democracy, we share an obligation to protect the common interest in every decision we make.”

So-called “job killing regulations” have become a favorite target of Republicans since the economic downturn, as legislators have denounced the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Labor Relations Board, and virtually every other government agency that writes rules. The EPA has emerged as target number one, with Republican presidential candidates promising to shut it down for good and the GOP-controlled House of Representatives seeking to defund it at every turn.

According to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, however, the “job-killing” part of the phrase “job-killing regulation” is built largely on myth. Last year, EPI released a report that found that several of the EPA’s proposed environmental regulations would actually create jobs. Now that the EPA has finalized a rule regulating toxic waste, EPI has used that rule to analyze whether such regulations are, indeed, job-killers. Once again, it found the opposite to be true, and said the new rule will actually create more jobs than it previously estimated:

Previous studies (such as Bivens 2011) that have estimated the jobs impact of specific proposed regulatory changes have probably understated the gains to employment spurred by the rule, likely by roughly 50%. But even given these understatements, the effects of some specific regulatory changes—such as the toxics rule, the largest single air-quality rule currently being proposed by the EPA—are surely positive for job creation. [...]

Even with multiplier effects, these estimates translate into job gains of roughly 117,000 to 135,000 in 2015, depending on whether one or both offsets to the job-depressing effects of price increases are used. … But what this reassessment does make clear is that it is near-inconceivable that adoption of the rule will cost any jobs at all in the near term. The effect will be unambiguously positive.

The study is hardly the first indication that the GOP’s “job-killing regulations” rhetoric is built on a myth. The EPA’s regulation of the coal industry helped boost industry employment to a 15-year high, and EPA regulations aimed at cleaning up Chesapeake Bay would create 35 times more jobs than the GOP’s favorite pet project, the Keystone XL pipeline. The GOP’s spiel has even fallen flat with business leaders large and small, with one CEO saying there was “no question” the new regulations would create jobs.

One of the favorite conservative myths of the moment involves the supposed “job-killing” effects of regulations coming out of the Obama administration. Today, it was evidently 2012 GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s turn to take this tall tale out for a spin. During an event in New Hampshire, Romney claimed that the rate of new regulations under Obama has “increased four-fold,” resulting in businesses being buried under a pile of red tape:

The level of regulation in America, every the regulators, the government, come up with new regulations. And they send them out. The rate of regulatory burden has increased four-fold since Obama has become president. Four times the amount of regulation coming out per year as in the past. And so businesses say, ‘gosh, I’m not sure I want to invest in America.’

Watch it:

This statistic has absolutely no basis in reality. In fact, it isn’t true according to the Romney campaign. When Romney made the same claim during an interview with NPR in September, NPR asked the Romney campaign for verification, at which point the campaign was forced to admit that “the Governor misspoke.”

Instead, the Romney camp told NPR that new regulations under Obama are twice what they were under President George W. Bush. Trouble is, that’s not true either, as Bloomberg News pointed out:

Obama’s White House approved 613 federal rules during the first 33 months of his term, 4.7 percent fewer than the 643 cleared by President George W. Bush’s administration in the same time frame, according to an Office of Management and Budget statistical database reviewed by Bloomberg.

Later on during the event, Romney claimed that, according to an official government report, regulations costs the U.S. economy $1.7 trillion annually. That number, according to economists, also isn’t true. In fact, John Irons of the Economic Policy Institute found that the study Romney cited “contains basic conceptual mistakes and relies on extraordinarily poor data.” “Its results should neither be used as a valid measure of the economic costs of regulation nor as a guide for policy,” he said.

For Romney, using these outright falsehoods helps him paint the Obama administration as some sort of regulatory behemoth, smooshing small businesses beneath its heels. However, when actual small businesses are asked whether regulations are killing jobs, the answer is always a resounding no.

Even as Republicans and CEOs of major companies complain that taxes are stifling job creation, corporations have been sitting on trillions of dollars in cash reserves, at some of the highest levels on record. The New York Times this morning notes another wrinkle in this story, pointing out that some companies have been laying off workers at the same time that they’re spending billions to buy back their own shares, thus enriching executives:

When Pfizer cut its research budget this year and laid off 1,100 employees, it was not because the company needed to save money.

In fact, the drug maker had so much cash left over, it decided to buy back an additional $5 billion worth of stock on top of the $4 billion already earmarked for repurchases in 2011 and beyond. [...]

There has been a steady drumbeat of other companies laying off workers even as they have disclosed plans to buy back more stock. On June 23, Campbell Soup said it would buy back $1 billion in stock; five days later it announced plans to eliminate 770 jobs. Hewlett-Packard announced a $10 billion stock repurchase in July, and jettisoned 500 jobs in September after it discontinued its TouchPad and smartphone product lines.

“It’s an extraordinarily unimaginative way to use money,” said former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. By buying back shares and lowering the number that are in circulation, executives can make their own “earnings per share” number look better, thus boosting their bonuses.

Part of the problem is that companies don’t see any demand in the economy, thanks to high unemployment, lack of consumer confidence, and austerity at the state budget level. But at the same time that they’re using billions to enrich themselves, corporate executives are whining that the problems in the economy have to do with regulation and taxes, and spend their time pushing for new tax giveaways that would boost their already high levels of cash even higher. But if the way that they’re employing their current stockpiles of money is any indication, corporations’ attempts to secure more through lower taxes should be met with extreme skepticism.