Approaching economic stall speed

Government regulations not justified on a cost-benefit basis, plus the cumulative weight of all regulations, result in a dead-weight loss to an economy. The United States now has more than 1 million regulations, and the Code of Federal Regulations runs to more than 175,000 pages spread over 238 volumes. Clyde Wayne Crews and Ryan Young of the Competitive Enterprise Institute calculate the cost of these regulations to be about $1.8 trillion per year, or roughly 11 percent of GDP. Most European countries have similar or even greater regulatory burdens.