The federal government’s approach to emergency relief has long been to open its checkbook and pay whatever it took to get communities back on their feet. Agencies had budgets for disaster response, but nature defied prediction; overruns were the rule, not the exception.

After Hurricane Irene flooded large swaths of the Northeast, however, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., declared that the era of the open checkbook was over. Instead of borrowing from the future to pay for repairs, Cantor said, Congress must offset any new relief spending with cuts in other programs. He’s right that Washington needs a better approach to disaster relief, but that’s not it.

Events such as Irene or the earthquake that rattled the eastern seaboard prompt conflicting responses. As a nation, we feel a duty to help our compatriots who fall victim to natural forces beyond their control. But a federal backstop of that sort creates a moral hazard, enabling people to take — and local governments to tolerate — risks that they couldn’t afford if they knew there would be no federal aid forthcoming. Agencies try to reduce that hazard by offering aid only to individuals and communities that meet certain standards, such as carrying flood insurance in flood zones. But those steps haven’t prevented costly losses, particularly to major public facilities such as roads, sewers and schools.

Washington needs to do more to encourage people and local governments to mitigate risks and insure themselves against nature’s wrath. The more progress they make on that front, the less help they’ll need from the federal government.

— Los Angeles Times - - -Are regulations truly a hindrance to businesses?Not according to 200 members of the National Association for Business Economics.“Eighty percent of survey respondents felt that the current regulatory environment was ‘good’ for American businesses and the overall economy,” concluded NABE, in its August 2011 Economic Policy Survey.NABE is the largest international association of applied economists, strategists, academics and policymakers committed to the application of economics, was founded in 1959 and is one of the member organizations of the Allied Social Sciences Association.Recently, the Obama Administration unveiled nearly 500 changes aimed at saving businesses money in a number of different ways such as consolidating their IRS paperwork, simplifying hazard warnings they must post for workers and expediting payment to government contractors.The changes are meant to save more than $10 billion over the next five years and bolster job and economic growth, or so the White House hopes.But according to Speaker of the House John Boehner and Sen. John Barrasso (both Republicans), the administration has proposed more than 340 regulations at a cost of more than $65 billion to businesses.After much research and several Google searches, we have been unable to come up with any actual factual basis for the claim.Diane Katz, a regulatory policy research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told the Los Angeles Times that when all the regulations imposed in the first two years of Barack Obama’s term are fully implemented, they will cost businesses roughly two-thirds the total expense from the rules generated in George W. Bush’s eight years in office.We hope the Obama administration continues to look at the current regulatory environment and changes those regulations that need to be changed, eliminate those no longer needed and institute those that are absolutely required.

— Brattleboro (Vt.) Reformer