The Regulatory State
Excerpts from the Cato Institute annual snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State: The 10,000 Commandments
·
The 2002 Federal Register contained
an all-time record 75,606 pages, a nearly 9 percent increase over 2001
·
The five most active rule-producing
agencies (the Departments of Transportation, Treasury, Agriculture, and Interior
and the Environ-mental Protection Agency) account for 50 percent of all rules
under consideration.
·
The Office of Management and
Budget’s latest report on the costs and benefits of federal regulations finds
cumulative 1992–2002 costs of “major” regulations to be between $38 and
$44 billion, while noting costs of all rules could be more than 10 times larger.
·
Based on a more broadly constructed
competing compilation of annual regulatory costs by economists Thomas Hopkins
and Mark Crain, regulatory costs hit an estimated $860 billion in 2002, an
amount equivalent to 43 percent of all FY 2002 outlays.
·
Regulatory costs are five times the
$158 billion budget deficit.
·
Regulatory costs are five times the
$158 billion budget deficit.
·
Regulatory costs of $860 billion
are equivalent to 8.2 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, estimated at
$10,443 billion for 2002.
·
Federal regulatory costs of $860
billion combined with outlays of $2,011 billion bring the federal government’s
share of the economy to 27 percent.
· Regulatory costs also exceed all corporate pretax profits, which were $699 billion in 2001.
· On the basis of estimates from the Weidenbaum and Mercatus Centers, agencies spent $25 billion merely to administer and police the regulatory state in 2002, 14 percent more than the previous year. Counting the $860 billion in off-budget costs, that brings the total regulatory burden to $885 billion.
An excellent article on the excesses of over-regulation:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,92130,00.html
An excellent article on Alan Greenspan's recent testimony that "Regulators Kill Corporate Spending"