Small Businesses, Virginia Child Support, and the CEI Podcast

Small Businesses

The Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy has released a study showing that the burden of government regulation disproportionately falls onto small businesses.

Research Associate Matthew Melchiorre explains.

“Without an army of specialized compliance officers on-hand, small firms are significantly disadvantaged compared to their larger competitors who can afford to achieve economies of scale in regulatory compliance. Unfortunately, without the budget to hire employees solely dedicated to bureaucratic appeasement, small businesses lose competitiveness relative to larger establishments because the former suffers from less efficient regulatory compliance in relation to the latter and also from less production by having to take an employee away from doing something economically productive in order to fill out bureaucratic paperwork. Sadly, the situation is only poised to get worse with the looming implementation of the regulation-behemoths of Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank Act. Apparently, Washington doesn’t think that $1.75 trillion in total annual regulatory costs on the economy is enough.”

Virginia Child Support

Virginia is considering changes to laws regarding divorce and child support.

Senior Counsel Hans Bader comments.

“Virginia looks likely to increase its child-support obligations on non-custodial parents, based on flawed methods of calculating child-rearing costs that overstate child-rearing costs. As I explain further below, the result is likely to be excessive child support obligations for most non-custodial parents in the state. (Virginia’s child-support guidelines already assume that parents spend far more on their children than couples like I and my wife actually spend. To spend as much as Virginia’s guidelines mandate that non-custodial parents pay in child support, we would have to do something really expensive, like feeding our daughter steak at every meal, and buying her lots of designer clothing.)”

CEI Podcast

In the latest CEI Podcast, Fellow in Regulatory Studies Ryan Young talks to Vice President for Policy Wayne Crews about the true cost of federal regulations.

Listen here.