Inertia Wins!

If anything good came out of the Bush 43 years, it’s that his two-term onslaught of spending, deficits, regulation, and rapid government growth finally disabused many people of the notion that the GOP will actually enact limited-government policies. It was during this time that George Will, who had long vacillated between Hamiltonian and Madisonian phases throughout his career, rediscovered his inner James Madison. If anything, he has become even more classically liberal during the Obama years. That’s why I was especially pleased that in his latest column, he praises CEI’s own Wayne Crews and the new edition of Ten Thousand Commandments:

Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute has recently published his “Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State.” This year’s 20th-anniversary edition notes that regulation, the “hidden tax,” costs almost $2 trillion not counted among the official federal outlays. Using mostly government data, Crews concludes:

The cost of regulations ($1.806 trillion) is now more than half the size of the federal budget and 11.6 percent of GDP. This costs $14,768 per U.S. household, equal to 23 percent of the average household income of $63,685. Regulatory compliance costs exceed the combined sum of income taxes paid by corporations ($237 billion) and individuals ($1.165 trillion). Then add $61 billion in on-budget spending by agencies that administer regulations.

Crews’s “Anti-Democracy Index” measures “the ratio of regulations issued by agencies relative to laws passed by Congress.” In 2012, the index was 29, meaning that 29 times more regulations were issued by agencies than there were laws passed by Congress. “This disparity,” Crews writes, “highlights a substantial delegation of lawmaking power to unelected agency officials.”

The entire column is well worth reading. See also a recent Wall Street Journal editorial on Ten Thousand Commandments, and, of course, the study itself.

This week in the world of regulation:

• During the holiday-shortened week, 61 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. This is down from 68 new final rules the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every 2 hours and 45 minutes — 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
• All in all, 1,427 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year.
• If this keeps up, the total tally for 2013 will be 3,449 new final rules.
• Last week, 1,162 new pages were added to the 2013 Federal Register, for a total of 32,928 pages.
• At its current pace, the 2013 Federal Register will run 78,400 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 13 so far in 2013.
• The total estimated compliance costs of this year’s economically significant regulations ranges from $5.58 billion to $10.19 billion.
• So far, 102 final rules that meet the broader definition of “significant” have been published in 2013.
• So far this year, 254 final rules affect small business; 23 of them are significant rules.

Highlights from final rules published last week:

• A new rule from U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Treasury Department implements parts of the recent U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement.
• The federal government has a Citrus Administrative Committee. A new Agricultural Marketing Service regulation “requires all fresh citrus handlers to provide the Committee with a list of all growers whose fruit they handled each season.”
• Cotton growers are required to pay the AMS $2.20 per bale they produce, same as in 2012. A bale weighs 500 pounds.
• The Fish and Wildlife Service is adding 38 new species from Hawaii to the endangered species list, delisting one plant species, and reaffirmed the listing of two others.

For more data, go to TenThousandCommandments.com.

The cost of government is far more than it taxes and spends. Regulatory costs count, too. One of our biggest jobs here at CEI is to make that point. As long as the regulatory state continues to grow, this becomes more important with each passing year. Fortunately, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review’s editorial board agrees, as they opined yesterday:

The Competitive Enterprise Institute ( cei.org) says that regulating rather than legislating pays for programs with private-sector resources rather than tax dollars. CEI says regulation is “off-budget taxation” — and business owners, workers and families ultimately foot the bill through higher taxes and/or lower wages.

CEI’s new 20th-anniversary edition of its “Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State” estimates yearly compliance costs at $1.8 trillion — exceeding half of total federal expenditures for the first time, as well as Canada’s or Mexico’s GDP. And at $14,678 per family, red tape trails only housing among typical household costs.

Read the whole thing here. See also the Wall Street Journal’s take here, and the new Ten Thousand Commandments report here.