A favorite GOP talking point is that a slew of regulation and taxes are preventing employers from creating jobs, which explains the stubbornly high unemployment rate. “By pursuing a steady repeal of job-destroying regulations, we can help lift the cloud of uncertainty hanging over small and large employers alike, empowering them to hire more workers,” said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA). “Business owners are reluctant to create jobs today if they’re going to need to pay more tomorrow to comply with onerous new regulations,” claimed Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME).

But a new study from the San Francisco Federal Reserve finds that this line of thinking is largely bunk:

Figure 3 shows there was almost no correlation between job growth in a state from 2008 to 2011 and the increase in the percentage of businesses citing regulation and taxes as their primary concern. In fact, if anything, the correlation is positive.

States in which businesses increasingly cited regulation and taxes experienced higher job growth, although this correlation is not statistically significant. The lack of correlation is not a matter of the timing we choose. For example, there also is no strong correlation if we examine the 2009–11 period or the 2010–11 period instead.

As this chart shows, there is basically no relationship between businesses citing increased regulations and taxes and higher unemployment rates:

In fact, some studies show that far from killing jobs, regulations help create them and help boost economic growth.

Instead, the San Francisco Fed shows that lack of job creation is tied to a lack of demand — customers don’t have any money to spend, so businesses have no reason to expand. “U.S. counties with high household debt levels coming into the recession are the same counties with depressed levels of employment in the nontradable sector today,” the study said.

Airline manufacturer Boeing’s newest plane, the 787 Dreamliner, is grounded around the world due to concerns over the lithium battery on which it relies. On January 7, a battery caught fire inside a parked Dreamliner in Japan, raising concerns that similar problems may be prevalent in the new planes.

The Federal Aviation Administration, the airline industry’s regulator, relied heavily on data provided by Boeing showing that the lithium batteries “featured redundant safeguards that were essentially foolproof,” the Wall Street Journal reported this morning. And though the airline industry is safer today that it has ever been, the FAA is increasingly relying on airline manufacturers to regulate themselves because it has “neither the budget nor the expertise” to test battery systems and other aircraft features itself:

Such reliance on manufacturers in certifying new planes is the standard approach for the agency, which today oversees the safest airline fleet in history. But barely days after vouching for the jet’s safety, the FAA’s about-face is focusing renewed attention on how cutting-edge aircraft are brought into service. [...]

The aircraft-approval process has long been a give-and-take between manufacturer and regulator, with the two sides collaborating and sharing information. Compared with the industry, the FAA has neither the budget nor the expertise to do extensive testing on its own. Instead, it often designates company teams to do the bulk of the work, with FAA participation and oversight.

Lithium-ion batteries have never before been used in aircraft, but when Boeing developed its new system for use in the Dreamliner, it ultimately “had the lead in certifying the safety and reliability of the batteries,” the Journal reported. After 200,000 hours testing, the system received final approval from the FAA, which never re-evaluated its 2007 decision to approve the battery’s use. And so, last week, Boeing debuted an aircraft featuring never-before-used technology that it seemingly developed, certified, and regulated itself, with the FAA performing only in an “oversight” role.

The FAA isn’t alone. Allowing industries to self-regulate has become an increasingly common practice in an era of crunched budgets and shrinking staff sizes at enforcement agencies. The Department of Energy has considered outsourcing fracking regulations to the natural gas industry, even as concerns about the environmental implications of the practice continue to mount. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has tested food safety reforms that would shift much of the responsibility for regulating poultry to manufacturers. Trial runs of the program found far higher rates of defects in approved poultry products than there were in samples reviewed by government regulators.

In the financial industry, regulatory agencies can’t afford to fill their staffs or enforce regulations, a problem that played an extensive role in the collapse of the housing market. With less oversight and more responsibility, banks rubber-stamped mortgage applications and foreclosure documents, committing fraud, abusing homeowners, and bringing the American economy to the brink of collapse in the process. Lack of oversight and regulation also played an extensive role in interest rate-rigging and money laundering scandals at large banks.

Some responsibility for regulation will inevitably fall to private companies, no matter how well-funded, staffed, and trained regulatory agencies are. But the concerns that have emerged with the Dreamliner are yet another indication that our regulatory agencies need to be fully-funded, and that leaving too much of the regulatory responsibility to private companies is a recipe for disaster for consumers.

Our guest blogger is Amy Sinden, a member scholar at the Center for Progressive Reform and professor at the Temple University Beasley School of Law.

“Election over, administration unleashes new rules,” trumpeted an Associated Press story this week.

What are these newly unleashed rules? Perhaps the big food safety rules that have been stalled for more than a year have gone through? Rules limiting greenhouse gas emissions from new and existing power plants? Long-awaited rules to protect coal miners’ safety?

Not quite. In fact, the AP strained to come up with just tiny examples: “[T]he Environmental Protection Agency has proposed rules to update water quality guidelines for beaches and other recreational waters and deal with runoff from logging roads.”

The recreational waters standard was a welcome development, but not particularly consequential or abrupt. EPA was required by law to issue the recreational water standards by 2005; it has issued them now only after being ordered by a court to do so. And as the agency explained in its press release, “The criteria released today do not impose any new requirements; instead, they are a tool that states can choose to use in setting their own standards.”

As for the rule earlier this month on runoff from logging roads, it’s not what you might imagine: it says that EPA will not be regulating pollution from logging roads. That regulation was issued in an incredibly short period of time; it took only three months from the agency proposing a rule to issuing its final “rule.” If only the Administration were so aggressive with protective rules.

The AP next points to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s proposal to require event data recorders (black boxes) in cars. Also a welcome requirement, but again not evidence of the regulatory deluge that conservatives quoted in the article bemoan. In reality, 96 percent of new cars already have the devices, and the auto industry is not opposing the requirement.

In truth, the administration has made little apparent progress on environmental, health and safety since the election. Given that the administration essentially stopped regulating for a period of months in the run-up to Election Day, we might have expected more activity. Some progress is possible later today, when the EPA is under court order to finally issue a rule on soot pollution. But a host of key rules still hang in the balance.

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The globally popular English soccer club Manchester United made its initial public offering on Friday, and has been trading essentially flat since then. As ThinkProgress noted, Manchester United’s IPO highlighted the absurdity of the so-called JOBS Act — championed by Congressional Republicans and signed by President Obama in April — which allowed the club to avoid a host of securities laws and disclosures.

For instance, under the law, the 134-year old club was allowed to file as an “emerging” company, as Ed Mierzwinski of U.S. PIRG wrote:

The venerable English football club Manchester United, founded in 1878, is expected to file an IPO today under a new deregulatory U.S. law, the so-called JOBS Act of 2012, that passed overwhelmingly despite opposition from U.S. PIRG and other investor protection organizations, because it was supposedly intended to help newer, smaller, “emerging” companies go public without dealing with pesky securities law requirements designed to deter fraud and chicanery.

As Marketwatch noted, calling United is an “emerging” company is a “questionable concept for the operator of an 134-year-old football club.” The offering raised $234 million for the club, valuing it at more than $2 billion.

And the club is far from the only entity gaming the JOBS Act. The misnamed law has already allowed significant financial shenanigans, as shell companies with no employees are popping up and filing as “emerging,” giving bigger businesses a way to take advantage of the law’s lax disclosure provisions.

“The Glazers [Manchester United's owners] have really shielded this operating company from investors, so the confidential nature of the IPO is particularly concerning in this case,” Francis Gaskins, President of IPO Desktop, told CNN Money. “They’re the poster child for what’s wrong with this law.”