Inertia Wins!

This week in the world of regulation:

• Last week, 80 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. There were 68 new final rules the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every 2 hours and 6 minutes — 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
• All in all, 2,078 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year.
• If this keeps up, the total tally for 2013 will be 3,664 new final rules.
• Last week, 1,684 new pages were added to the 2013 Federal Register, for a total of 45,370 pages.
• At its current pace, the 2013 Federal Register will run 78,768 pages.
• Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. No such rules were published last week, for a total of 17 so far in 2013.
• The total estimated compliance costs of this year’s economically significant regulations ranges from $5.78 billion to $10.39 billion.
• So far, 143 final rules that meet the broader definition of “significant” have been published in 2013.
• So far this year, 346 final rules affect small business; 32 of them are significant rules.

Highlights from final rules published last week:

• If you use radar to detect foreign objects on an airport runway, you must get a license from the FCC.
• The diamond darter, a small fish first discovered five years ago, is now classified as endangered.
• The San Clemente Island lotus and the San Clemente Island paintbrush, two plant species native to California, have been upgraded from endangered to threatened.
• The federal government has a strict policy against selling turtle eggs and small turtles for profit. In fact, if the FDA catches you with such turtles and you aren’t a researcher, federal regulations literally require you to kill the turtles while someone from the FDA watches you do it. Starting in January 2014, the FDA is thankfully lifting this particular death penalty.
• The EPA is approving and disapproving various state-level air quality regulations in Wisconsin, West Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina.
• The Federal Election Commission hands out fines to people who violate its regulations. They are inflation-adjusted.
• A new Dodd-Frank rule bars felons and other sketchy people from “reliance on Rule 506 of Regulation D.”

For more data, go to TenThousandCommandments.com.