Regulate! Regulate! Dance to THEIR music!
According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Biden/Harris heaped droves of regulations on American families in the amount of $15,000 per family.
Here is a breakdown of the annual cost of regulations:
And “China” Kamala (ChiKam) plans even MORE regulations!
- Federal regulation’s total compliance costs and economic effects are at least $2.117 trillion annually in Ten Thousand Commandments’ estimate, and almost certainly higher.
- An October 2023 National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) report models regulatory compliance at $3.079 trillion annually.
- US households pay on average $15,788 annually in a hidden regulatory tax, which consumes 17 percent of income and 22 percent of household expenses.
- These outlays exceed expenditures on health care, food, transportation, entertainment, apparel, services, and savings. Only the costs of housing, which stand at $24,298 annually, exceed regulation.
- The higher NAM figure implies $22,962 per household, or 31 percent of the household expense budget.
- The regulatory tax of $2.117 trillion rivals individual income tax costs estimated at $2.328 trillion for 2023 and stands at nearly four times the corporate income tax of $546 billion.
- The NAM cost figure of $3.1 trillion annually would exceed the sum of both ($2.9 trillion).
- If it were a country, US regulation would be the world’s 10th-largest economy, ranking behind Canada and ahead of Italy.
- If we exclude the US economy from the list, the US regulation economy would be the ninth largest, still behind Canada and ahead of Italy.
- The 10.34 billion hours Washington says it took to complete federal paperwork in 2022, according to the Information Collection Budget, translate to the equivalent of 14,883 human lifetimes.
- The tally of final rules for 2023 stood at 3,018, which is the second-lowest count since at least 1976.
- On the other hand, the Federal Register containing those rules surged to 89,368 pages, the second-highest tally on record and a 12 percent rise over 2022.
- Although we have fewer new rules, they appear to be broader in scope.
- During calendar year 2023, agencies issued 3,018 rules, whereas Congress enacted 68 laws. Thus, agencies issued 44 rules for every law enacted by Congress.
- This Unconstitutionality Index—the ratio of regulations issued by agencies to laws passed by Congress and signed by the president—underlines how much agency lawmaking has replaced that of elected officials. The average ratio over the past 10 years is 23 rules for every law.
- Since the Federal Register first began itemizing final rules in 1976, 217,565 have been issued. Since 1993, when the first edition of Ten Thousand Commandments appeared, agencies have issued 120,475 final rules.
- A 2023 draft consolidated version of the White House Report to Congress on the Benefits and Costs of Federal Regulations caught up on fiscal years 2020–2022. The report for 2023 has still not been released.
- A total of only 31 “major” rules had both benefits and costs quantified, and these add $13 billion to the annual regulatory cost bill; another 56 rules with costs but not benefits quantified add another $46 billion to annual costs.
- Employing our lower estimate, regulatory burdens of $2.1 trillion amount to nearly 8 percent of US gross domestic product (GDP), reported by the Commerce Department at $27.36 trillion in 2023.
- The NAM regulatory figure implies 11 percent of GDP.
- Regulatory costs stand at over 60 percent of the level of corporate pretax profits of $3.523 trillion.
- The NAM figure would take that to over 80 percent.
- When regulatory costs of $2.1 trillion are combined with federal outlays of $6.135 trillion, the federal government’s share of the $27.36 trillion economy reaches at least 30 percent. State and local spending and regulation add to these costs.
- Until April 2023, a subset of each year’s 3,000-plus rules was deemed economically significant, referring to annual economic effects of $100 million or more. Biden’s Executive Order 14094 (“Modernizing Regulatory Review”) eliminated that category and initiated a higher $200 million Section 3(f)(1) Significant category.
- In the year-end 2023 edition of the twice-yearly Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions, 69 federal departments, agencies, and commissions present 3,599 regulatory actions flowing through the pipeline as follows:
- 2,524 rules in the active (prerule, proposed, final) phase
- 431 recently completed rules
- 644 long-term rules
- Of the 3,599 regulations in the fall 2023 Unified Agenda’s pipeline, 304 are Section 3(f)(1) Significant category rules (which implies at least $60 billion in economic impact), as follows:
- 233 rules in the active (prerule, proposed, final) phase
- 41 completed rules
- 30 long-term rules
- Despite his own higher $200 million threshold, high-significance rules in the Biden pipeline outnumber the Bush, Obama, and Trump years when the lower $100 million threshold applied.
- Major rules as defined in the Congressional Review Act leave a $100 million threshold intact despite Biden’s executive order. The Government Accountability Office database contains 76 finalized major rules for 2023. The Biden average exceeds those of Bush, Obama, and Trump.
- Final rules affecting small business appear to be mounting and could generate calls for reform. Biden’s three years have averaged 870 rules annually in the Federal Register affecting small business, compared with 694 and 701 for Obama and Trump, respectively.
- Of the 3,599 rules and regulations in the fall 2023 Unified Agenda pipeline, 690 affect small businesses; of those, 370 required an official “regulatory flexibility analysis.”
- Biden-era mandates affect state and local governments at heights not seen in over a decade. Rules in the Unified Agenda pipeline affecting state governments stand at 507, while rules affecting local governments stand at 349.
- The five most active rule-producing executive branch entities in the Unified Agenda—the departments of the Interior, the Treasury, Transportation, Commerce, and Health and Human Services—account for 1,497 rules, or 42 percent of all rules in the pipeline. The five most active independent agencies account for another 318 rules.
- From the nation’s founding through 2022, more than 15,635 executive orders have been issued. Biden issued 24 executive orders in 2023, well below his peak 77 of 2021. Biden’s presidential memoranda continue to outstrip the average of recent predecessors.
- Public notices in the Federal Register always exceed 22,000 annually, with uncounted guidance documents and other proclamations that hold potential regulatory effect among them, whereas other guidance documents issued do not appear in the Federal Register at all. In 2023, 23,197 notices were issued. There have been 714,563 public notices since 1994 and over a million since the 1970s.
DC bureaucrats are out of control. Treasury Secretary Yellen calls for $78 TRILLION to tackle climate change. So to quote The Carpenters, they’ve only just begun to regulate.
