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Regulations
take $1.8 trillion bite out of economy
By:
Christine Hall
5/5/2014
The
Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) this week released its annual
Ten Thousand Commandments report on the size and scope of federal
regulations.
According
to the report, federal regulations took a $1.863 trillion bite out of
the U.S. economy in 2013. The report aims to establish a baseline for
the largely unknown “hidden tax” of the U.S. regulatory state,
since more than 99 percent of federal regulations are never subjected
to cost-benefit analysis.
“Federal
agencies crank out thousands of new regulations every year, but we
have little information on the cost or effectiveness of most of
them,” said report author Clyde Wayne Crews Jr. “There is little
transparency and no reliable source of information on exactly what
benefits all these rules are supposed to be generating or if they are
serving their intended purpose.”
‘Holding
Back Wealth Creation’
“Most
of the country is focused on our spending and debt problem, but
unless we also address our nation’s regulatory burden, our economy
will remain under water,” Crews said. “When compared to federal
spending, the cost of federal regulations was more than half the size
of the federal government’s 2013 budget of $3.5 trillion, and this
is part of what is holding back American innovation and wealth
creation.”
Crews
said an already huge regulatory state has grown at an alarming rate
during the Obama administration...
Read
the rest of the article with photos and links at Human Events
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