Ten Thousand Commandments
Ten Thousand Commandments
An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State
An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State
The federal government primarily funds its programs in three ways. The first is to raise taxes to pay for new programs. The second is to borrow money to pay for them (with a promise to pay back that borrowed money, with interest, from taxes collected in the future). No matter how controversial government spending programs can be, taxpayers can always see how much programs cost by looking at the federal budget, and Congress can be held accountable for programs that are controversial. While not perfect, such accountability is a fundamental, necessary condition for controlling government.
The third way the government can accomplish its goals is to regulate. That is, rather than pay directly and book the expense of a new initiative, it can require that the private sector and lower-level governments pay. By regulating, the government can carry out desired programs but avoid using tax dollars to fund them. This process sometimes allows Congress to escape accountability and to blame agencies for costs. Since disclosure and accountability for regulation are limited, policymakers have little incentive to care about the extent of regulatory costs or where those costs stand in relation to ordinary government spending. Regulatory costs are unbudgeted and lack the formal presentation to the public and media to which ordinary federal spending is subject, and thus regulatory initiatives allow the government to direct private-sector resources to a significant degree without much public fuss. In that sense, regulation can be thought of as off-budget taxation.
The purpose of Ten Thousand Commandments is accountability. Every year Wayne Crews researches and writes Ten Thousand Commandments to hold government officals accountable for the costs they pass on to the American taxpayers.
The goal is Transparency.
President Barack Obama’s federal budget for fiscal year (FY) 2011 proposes $3.83 trillion in discretionary, entitlement, and interest spending. In the previous fiscal year, the president had proposed $3.552 trillion. For
reference, George W. Bush had proposed the first-ever $3 trillion U.S. budget. In fact, President Bush was also the first to propose a $2 trillion federal budget—in 2002, a scant eight years ago.
Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects FY 2010 spending will end up at $3.524 trillion. The result: thanks to the bailout and “stimulus” frenzy, a projected FY 2010 deficit of a previously unthinkable
$1.349 trillion, down slightly from 2009.
To be sure, many other countries’ governments consume more of their national output than the U.S. government does. However, in absolute terms, the U.S. government is the largest government on planet Earth, whether one looks at revenues or expenditures.
Those costs fully convey the federal government’s on-budget scope, and they are sobering enough. Yet the government’s reach extends well beyond the taxes that Washington collects and the deficit spending and borrowing
now surging. Federal environmental, safety and health, and economic regulations cost hundreds of billions of dollars every year over and above the costs of the official federal outlays that now dominate the policy agenda.
Firms generally pass along to consumers the costs of some taxes. Likewise, some regulatory compliance costs that businesses face will find their way into consumer prices. Precise regulatory costs can never be fully known, because, unlike taxes, they are unbudgeted and often indirect. But scattered government and private data exist on scores of regulations and on the agencies that issue them, as well as on regulatory costs and benefits. Some of that information can be compiled to make the regulatory state somewhat more comprehensible. That is one purpose of the annual Ten Thousand Commandments report.
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