Federal Regulation Costs $1.127 Trillion
Though published by the Heartland Institute the study is based on previous work by Mark Crain –
To put this number in perspective, budgeted government spending for 2005 was $2.47 trillion, which means hidden regulatory costs are nearly half as much as all on-budget federal spending.
And citizens have no control over the matter due to the system –
In addition to creating huge regulatory costs, agencies continue to increase their sphere of control. Consider this: Congress passed and the president signed into law 161 bills in 2005. Regulatory agencies issued 4,062 rules.That means unelected bureaucrats are doing the bulk of the lawmaking.
and opaqueness –
To find out about regulatory trends and to accumulate information–such as the number of rules produced by each agency, their costs, and their benefits–interested citizens must comb through the Regulatory Plan and Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions–more than 1,000 pages of small multi-column print.
The solution, of course, is transparency. But the elite who are interested in transparent solutions are few and far between.
-Shlok
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