That would be “Administrative Law” – laws created and legally enforced (sometimes as felonies) by unelected, unaccountable, and unassailable bureaucrats. The Competitive Enterprise Institute has a report on how large of an impact this “extra-Constitutional” process of “legislating” has on the average American citizen who, if you haven’t been educated in government schools lately, our forefathers fought a war over “taxation without representation”). At least then, we knew who was doing what to us. Now, not so much – if at all. A sampling of the results:
- Federal regulations and intervention cost Americans $1.9 trillion in 2017.
- Federal regulation is a hidden tax that amounts to nearly $15,000 per U.S. household each year, more than Americans spend on any category in their family budget except for housing.
- In 2017, 97 laws were enacted by Congress during the calendar year, while 3,281 rules were issued by agencies. Thus, 34 rules were issued for every law enacted.
- If it were a country, U.S. federal regulation would be the world’s eighth-largest economy, ranking behind India and ahead of Italy.
- Many Americans are concerned about their annual tax burden, but total regulatory costs exceeded the $1.88 trillion the IRS collected in both individual and corporate income taxes in 2017.
- Some 67 federal departments, agencies, and commissions are currently working on 3,209 new regulations in various stages of development.
- The five most active rulemaking entities– the Departments of Commerce, Defense, Transportation, Treasury, and the Environmental Protection Agency–account for 1,359 rules, or 43 percent of all proposed regulations currently under consideration.
- The 2017 Federal Register contained 61,308 pages, the lowest count since 1993 and a 36 percent drop from Obama’s 95,894 pages in 2016, the highest level ever recorded.
The information in this report is based on a compilation of best available government and private data.
A breakdown of the whole report:
Executive Summary
Chapter 1: 9,999 Commandments?
Chapter 2: Toward a Federal Regulatory Budget
Chapter 3: The Cost of Regulation and Intervention
Chapter 4: Thousands of Pages and Rules in the Federal Register
Chapter 5: Presidential Executive Orders and Executive Memoranda
Chapter 6: More than 22,000 Public Notices Annually
Chapter 7: Analysis of the Regulatory Plan and the Unified Agenda of Federal Regulation
Chapter 8: Government Accountability Office Database on Regulations
Chapter 9: Regulation and the FCC
Chapter 10: Liberate to Stimulate
(H/T: CEI)
