Make America Stronger, Smarter and Save Trillions

The Hawaii Reporter discusses the costs of regulation with Wayne Crews. 

The magnitude of the costs of regulations for example, is staggering. Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) annually reports the costs of some of the regulations (federal regulations only—the states add billions more to the regulatory burdens) (http://tinyurl.com/26jh9vv). The title of the report is appropriately “Ten Thousand Commandments”. For the year 2007, the latest analysis available on the CEI website, the estimated costs for regulatory compliance to federal regulations is $1.157 trillion dollars. This is the equivalent of a huge hidden tax imposed on the American economy and is not known to those who haven’t seen the costs of compliance. It doesn’t seem to be common knowledge among our tax and spend Congressmen either. These compliance costs should anger voters and is an area where Congress could find many billions in savings for American business and to the consumers who always pay for this. The voters are eagerly looking for smart ways to cut the spending. Regulations, both state and federal, are great places to begin.

These hidden regulatory costs are more than triple the total corporate income taxes of $342 billion for 2007 which now are the largest in the world. On top of all of this are the regulatory administration and enforcement costs of $42 billion annually. This is quite a police force, don’t you think? And it’s a police force which does not generate a dime’s worth of wealth for our nation. Let’s fix this regulatory cancer on our economy. There is a need for common sense, defensible regulations, and a need for enforcement. But at the current levels of regulations the destructiveness is obvious.

Read the full article at Hawaii Reporter.