Dodds Mainstreet Punishment Bill

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With the focus this week on health care’s “home stretch” and concerns about government limiting the ability of ordinary Americans to make choices about medical treatment, another threat to freedom is accelerating that could harm Americans’ abilities to start a business, invest for retirement, and get affordable home and auto insurance policies. On Monday, after abruptly shutting down earnest negotiations between Senate Republicans, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd wannounced a partisan so-called financial regulatory reform bill that he will try to ram through his committee within a week.

And this 1336-page bill will do nothing to put restrictions on two entities that were proximate causes of the housing bubble, the government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and instead hit Main Street businesses and entrepreneurial firms that had nothing to do with the crisis. The bill’s specific provisions would penalize the corporate structure of public companies from Google to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, tax prudent banks stable home and auto insurers and their policy holders to pay for the bailout of the next Lehman or AIG, depress revenues from incorporation fees in Sen. Harry Reid’s Nevada and Vice President Biden’s Delaware by federalizing corporate governance laws, and put thousands of retailers who issue gift cards or even offer layaway plans under a new Federal Reserve bureaucracy to regulate credit.

Here are the highlights of some of most destructive provisions for the freedom of entrepreneurs, investors and consumers...

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