27 May 2014
Over the Memorial Day weekend, the Big
Retail lobby created a dubious driving distraction. The Merchants Payments Coalition, whose
members include retail giants like Walmart and 7-Eleven, took out a Business Wire press release warning motorists to “Get Ready to Be Side-Swiped by Your Bank’s
Exorbitant Credit-Card Fees.” In reality, it’s rent-seeking retailers and
allied politicians who are rear-ending American consumers on Memorial Day and
every day through the price controls they pushed for in Dodd-Frank’s Durbin
Amendment. Now, they are lobbying Washington to ram ordinary folks even more
with policies that will make security breaches like that of Target more likely
to happen.
27 May 2014
This is Part 7 of a series taking a
walk through some sections of Ten Thousand Commandments: An
Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State (2014 Edition). The cost of federal regulations amount
to the equivalent of around 11 percent of U.S. GDP, as I’d noted in the last installment of this series. But the U.S. economy is the world’s
largest, approaching $17 trillion. So it’s interesting to compare the estimated
cost of regulation to the size or national incomes of other countries around
the world. For starters, estimated U.S. regulatory
costs of $1.863 trillion surpass the 2012 gross domestic product of our nearest neighbors.
Canada’s GDP stood at $1.821 trillion, and Mexico’s GDP at $1.178 trillion.
The Federal
Register passed the 30,000-page mark on Friday, at least by unadjusted page count. After accounting for skips and
blank pages, the adjusted count, which this series tracks, stands at a
still-impressive 29,967 pages, and will shoot past 30,000 pages on Tuesday. On to the data:……
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