Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Washington’s Ten Thousand Commandments

Deficits, taxes, and spending are the defining issues of the 2012 campaign. Regulation deserves a seat at the table, too. The federal government spent $3.6 trillion in 2011. But according to the Small Business Administration (SBA), the annual cost of complying with federal regulations has exceeded $1 trillion since around 2005, and none of those costs appear in the federal budget. The federal government actually costs us half again more than most people think it does.
By way of comparison, Canada's entire Gross National Income is $1.42 trillion. The budget deficit is currently $1.08 trillion. Those are big numbers. And the cost of federal regulation is an even bigger number. This needs to change if the economy is to get back on track.
Politicians love to blame unregulated markets for America's economic troubles. But as the just-released 2012 edition of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s annual Ten Thousand Commandments report shows, those unregulated markets are hard to find. The federal government lists all of its regulations in the Code of Federal Regulations. It is more than 169,000 pages long and growing. Last year alone, 3,807 new final rules were published in the Federal Register -- more than 10 per day. In 2010, it was 3,573 new rules.
Small businesses bear an outsize share of regulatory burdens. Candidates from both parties constantly climb over each other to seize the mantle of Protector of Small Business. But their claims ring hollow if they don’t work to enact top-to-bottom regulatory reform.

Read more: http://spectator.org/archives/2012/06/05/washingtons-ten-thousand-comma

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