Red Tapeworm 2014: Cumulative Final Rules in the Federal Register
This is Part 13 of a series taking a walk through some sections of Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State (2014 Edition)
Let’s keep this one short. Picture is worth a thousand words, one power-hungry bureaucrat is worth a thousand congressmen, and all that.
The cumulative effect of regulation on the national economy and at the family and personal levels matters a great deal despite yearly fluctuations.
The good news is that, final rules issued by federal agencies last year did dip a little, but proposed rules ominously are on the increase, and the president promises to go around Congress to shape society according to his left-wing biases and intractable redistributionist mindset.
Regulations accumulate, and the framework for tomorrow is being laid by today’s political philosophy and its corresponding enactments.
The bottom line is that the ceaseless annual outflow of over 3,500 final rules, and often far more, has meant that about 87,282 rules have been issued since 1993, when the first edition of Ten Thousand Commandments appeared.
In that same amout of time, Congress passed “only” 4,224 public laws. (I’ve yearly counts in Appendix J here of “The Unconstitutionality Index.”)
The tail wags the dog, or has become the dog, when it comes to lawmaking. I track the number of annual proposed and final rules online here.
Red Tapeworm 2014 Series:
- Part 1: Guess Which Is the Largest Government on Earth?
- Part 2: Tardy Bureaucrats Gone Wild
- Part 3: Reckoning the Dollar Cost of Federal Regulation
- Part 4: Regulations Catching Up to Government Spending?
- Part 5: Regulations Cost More than Federal Income Taxes
- Part 6: The Federal Government “Eats” 31 Percent Of The U.S. Economy
- Part 7: U.S. Regulation Compared to the World’s Largest Economies
- Part 8: The High Cost of Overcriminalization
- Part 9: Thousands of Federal Register Pages
- Part 10: A Record Number of Federal Register Final Rule Pages
- Part 11: Federal Register Pages Per Decade
- Part 12: Number of Proposed and Final Rules In the Federal Register