Bureaucracy doesn’t just hurt — it kills

With all this outreach to give things away, how big is this federal bureaucracy and its red tape? Clyde Wayne Crews at the Competitive Enterprise Institute reports our regulations by themselves would constitute the tenth biggest economy in the world. By imposing a $1.86 trillion annual burden on the U.S., our regulatory costs top the entire GDP of Canada ($1.82 trillion), India ($1.84 trillion) and most other countries.
The bureaucratic burden is not spread equally. If it were, each American household would stagger under $14,974 a year in red-tape costs in addition to paying taxes. Since the load doesn’t fall equally, that means certain sectors — in particular the job-creators — must carry extra burdens. That’s one big reason they are slow to create jobs. Depending on the law, once employers reach a threshold of 50 workers, or just 25, or just 10, they are put into a category of extra regulations.