Washington's Insane Regulatory Burden

Deficits, taxes, and spending are the defining issues of 2012, write Ryan Young and Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, but "regulation deserves a seat at the table, too." Consider the following from CEI's annual Ten Thousand Commandments report:

• Federal regulations listed in the Code of Federal Regulations is more than 169,000 pages long and growing.
• The annual cost of complying with federal regulations has exceeded $1 trillion since around 2005, and none of those costs appears in the federal budget.
• Small businesses bear an outsized share of the burden: small businesses with fewer than 20 employees pay $10,585 per employee per year to comply with federal rules.
• Big businesses, with more than 500 employees, pay about $7,755 per employee per year to comply, giving them a built-in competitive advantage of nearly $3,000 per employee, courtesy of Washington.

Those price tags will only grow as big government agencies and their regulations expand.

Congress passed 81 new laws last year, but agencies issued 3,870 new regulations. ... Of those rules, 212 are classified "economically significant," which means they cost more than $100 million per year. 

The authors argue that regulations-without-representation, i.e., regulations and rules written by bureaucrats requiring no approval by Congress, needs to be stopped.

Just as Congress is supposed to pass a budget every year for what it spends, it should pass a regulatory budget. If it caps regulatory burdens at, say, $1 trillion, it would then have to prioritize which rules it believes provide the most bang for the buck. Voters would also know when Congress votes to increase regulatory costs, giving members at least some incentive to keep regulation in check.

The fight for real regulatory reform is a long one, not least because neither party has shown the seriousness needed to see it through. But the only way to win is to fight.