Thanks, Obama.
That’s a hashtag that The Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy Studies may wish to use on Twitter in sharing the results of a new economic analysis that assails the Obama Administration for an “aggressive regulatory agenda” at the FCC that led to nearly $40 billion in reduced telecommunication sector investment.
Citing “empirical research” in its report, “‘Regulatory Revival’ and Employment in Telecommunications,” Phoenix Center Chief Economist Dr. George Ford concludes that the level of industry regulation seen during President Obama’s time in office lowered investment in the telecommunications sector between $20 billion and $40 billion annually, “robbing the nation of a boom in network expansion the public wants and Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act mandates.”
With what Dr. Ford calls a direct relationship between network investment and jobs, he asked how this diminished network investment affected employment in the telecommunications sector. Using standard economic techniques and publicly available data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Dr. Ford finds that between 2010 and 2016, the telecommunications sector lost approximately 100,000 jobs per year—including many “high-paying union jobs.”
Dr. Ford puts this loss at the pay-equivalent of about 130,000 “average” U.S. jobs.
He says, “For Broadband Service Providers, the Obama Administration proved to be an eight-year reign of terror, enacting one policy after another specifically designed to transfer economic profits in the Internet ecosystem away from the core and—either directly or indirectly—towards the edge. As firms are not passive recipients of regulation, my research confirms the obvious: The ‘regulatory revival’ at the FCC under President Obama substantially reduced network investment which, in turn, had a significant adverse effect on employment in the telecommunications sector.”
A full copy of “’Regulatory Revival’ and Employment in Telecommunications” may be downloaded at no charge from the Phoenix Center’s web page by clicking here.
The Phoenix Center is a Conservative-leaning think tank based in Washington, D.C.
