The Wall Street Journal posted “The $600BillionMan-A new report highlights one cost of Obama legacy.” (The posting is behind a paywall. Fortunately SePP* summarized the WSJ posting for us.) The summary is as follows:
SUMMARY: “As if taxes haven’t been high enough, the U.S. Government also forced Americans to spend an eye-watering $1.9 trillion in 2016 just to comply with federal regulations. That’s according to the latest annual “10,000 Commandments” report released today by Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. ‘If it were a country, U.S. regulation would be the world’s seventh-largest economy, ranking behind India and ahead of Italy,’ notes Mr. Crews. He adds that our regulatory tab is nearly as large as the total pretax profits of corporations.
“Mr. Crews has become one of the most hated men in Washington by tabulating the hidden costs—those not counted in the roughly $4 trillion of direct federal spending—that politicians and bureaucrats impose on the American economy. And nobody imposed more than Barack Obama. According to the Crews annual scorecards, the yearly cost of federal regulation soared by more than $700 billion in nominal dollars from 2008, the last full year of the Bush Administration, through Mr. Obama’s final full year of 2016. Adjusting for inflation, you can call Mr. Obama the $600 Billion Man.
“One measure of the amount of red tape spewing out of Washington is the number of pages of proposed and final rules printed in the Federal Register. ‘Of the top 10 all-time-high Federal Register page counts, seven occurred under President Barack Obama,’ notes Mr. Crews. And let’s hope that Mr. Obama’s latest record, set on his final lap in 2016, will never be broken. Mr. Crews reports that the register ‘finished 2016 at 95,894 pages, the highest level in its history and 19 percent higher than the previous year’s 80,260 pages.
Unelected bureaucrats are killing businesses with their avalanche of regulations and the resulting cost of implementing them. But the Obama Administration was the worst offender. Seven of Obama’s eight years in office, his administration was in the top ten of Federal Register Page Count. With the 2016 being the highest ever.
If you ever wonder what President Trump means when he says the “swamp needs draining”, this is it.
cbdakota
*SePP=Science & Environmental Policy Project
Climate Change Sanity 