Ten Thousand Commandments

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.

Ten Thousand Commandments 2011

President Barack Obama’s new federal budget proposal for fiscal year (FY) 2012 seeks $3.729 trillion in discretionary, entitlement, and interest spending.1 In the previous fiscal year, the president had proposed outlays of $3.83 trillion. As of January 2011, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) now projects FY 2011 spending will end up at $3.708 trillion.

For reference, President George W. Bush proposed not only the first-ever $3-trillion U.S. budget, but also the first $2-trillion federal budget—in 2002, only nine years ago.

The result: Thanks to the bailouts and other amplified spending, CBO projects a FY 2011 deficit of a previously unthinkable $1.48 trillion, greater than FY 2010’s actual deficit of $1.294 trillion.4 With the unveiling of the 2012 budget, President Obama projects an even larger FY 2011 deficit than CBO does: $1.645 trillion. This figure will be the largest deficit since World War II, at 11 percent of the entire U.S. economy.

To be sure, many other countries’ governments consume a greater share 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’s metric is revenues, expenditures, deficits, or accumulated debt.

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—perhaps trillions—of dollars every year over and above the costs of the official federal outlays that now dominate the policy debate.

Economics 101 explains how and why firms generally pass along to consumers the costs of some taxes. Likewise, some regulatory compliance costs that businesses face will find their way into the prices consumers pay. 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. Compiling some of that information can make the regulatory state somewhat more comprehensible. That is one purpose of the annual Ten Thousand Commandments report.