Ten Thousand Commandments Released Today

Today marks the release of the twentieth anniversary edition of Ten Thousand Commandments, Wayne Crews’ annual overview of the regulatory state. Over at the Daily Caller, Wayne and I briefly summarize of few of the report’s findings. Here’s a taste:

Since the first edition of Ten Thousand Commandments was published in 1993, a touch less than 1.43 million Federal Register pages have been published. That’s an average of 71,470 pages per year. Considering that an average year has 250 workdays (the Federal Register is not published on weekends or holidays), that roughly averages out to 286 pages per day. It takes a very busy federal government to fill that many pages each and every workday.

We also ran a few numbers and found something very interesting:

A standard ream of 20-pound weight paper, standard for office use, is about two inches thick. From that, we can calculate that our 1.43 million-page stack would be 476 feet tall. It would also weigh more than seven tons. Fittingly, this regulatory tower would rival the Washington Monument’s 555 feet for supremacy of Washington’s skyline. In fact, if the tower were to keep growing at its 20-year average pace, it would surpass the Washington Monument in 2016.

Read the whole thing here. And read the new Ten Thousand Commandments here.