Regulations and the Economy

By Rich Kozlovich

I know that I am really dating myself, but when I was a kid my grandfather used to love to watch a regular news show called The Ev and Charlie Show.   It was a bit like the old Crossfire show with Tom Braden and Pat Buchanan except I found Braden to be absolutely obnoxious, as was his replacement Michael Kinsley, who was also dismissive, arrogant and a smarmy little head wagger.

Ev and Charlie understood the concept of good manners. 

Everett Dirkson was a gravelly voiced smooth tongued Senator from Illinois who died in 1969. He made a statement that is still one of the most famous and much quoted statements when it comes to government taxing and spending. He said:

“A billion here and a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”

Dirkson was considered a conservative when it came to fiscal matters, but a liberal when it came to social matters and yet voted consistently to expand regulations. Does that sound like cognitive dissonance to anyone besides me? How anyone can anyone be intellectually honest and think that expanding the size of government by increasing regulations will not cost money, a lot of money, and that it will be spent wisely?

Perhaps the statement he should have posed is this:

"A few regulations here and a few regulations there and the first thing you know you have tyranny."

Cognitive dissonance is rampant. People running around having two clearly divergent opinions on the same subject in their heads at the same time. And somehow believe they are both correct.

Is it any wonder we have so many in America's industries think that going green is a good thing? Is it any wonder that so many believe the Montreal Protocol is based on real science? That the Kyoto Accords are about global warming and not global governance. That the Food Quality Protection Act, which is directly responsible for the nation's bed bug plague, was about food and protection versus a way to get rid of pesticides without going through all that nasty banning process where they would have to show facts as to why these products needed banned?

Worse yet, we have many in industry that believe going along and getting along with the activists will be good for industry, and they'll be our friends, and we'll all sing kumbaya holding hands.

That is absolute insanity!

There may be a short term gain, but the long term consequences will be absolutely disastrous.

Activists, regulators and legislators, seem to think a little over regulation can't hurt. But regulations have an impact, and over regulation is worse because it goes beyond what's necessary, and most importantly, this penchant to over regulate is a sickness in government. All these little "hurts" add up to become a major economic health cost to society. A "little" here and a "little" there adds up, and those costs have become unimaginable.

"According to a recent analysis from the Competitive Enterprise Institute U.S. regulatory costs in 2005 were approximately $1.13 trillion, equal to almost half of all of the government's discretionary, entitlement and interest spending ($2.47 trillion), and much larger than the sum of all corporate pre-tax profits -- $874 billion."

The cost of Federal regulations ran to a whopping $2.028 trillion in 2012.

According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute "the estimated regulatory cost burden is equivalent to more than 40 percent of the level of total federal spending, projected to be $4.4 trillion in 2019.

They go on to note that.... "In 2018"..... "Washington bureaucrats issued regulations at a rate of 11 for every one law Congress enacted……".

Those regulations are in fact laws the Congress didn't pass. They were imposed by an unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy as their interpretations of federal law, and amounts to a financial burden being carried by the American public to the tune of a hidden tax of $14,615.  A tax imposed every year, and it goes up every year.   And that doesn't even begin to cover the regulations imposed by states, counties and cities in the United States.

To paraphrase Bjørn Lomborg:

"Much of the expenditure on regulation is ill-spent on the most expensive cures that do the least good.”

Enormous amounts of money are being wasted on expensive worthless regulations promoting and implementing activist's green dreams.  But those dreams invariably end up being nightmares.   Whether it's food production, power generation, or pesticides, they've become the world's experts on being wrong.

We won’t have to wonder and worry about how much longer this will go on though. With almost 23 trillion dollars in debt, the money is fast running out.