How many rules are enough? Regulation works best when it’s simple, clearly defined, and non-intrusive…. and that clearly hasn’t been the case in America for quite a long time.
It’s not so much any particular one regulation as it is the “death by a thousand cuts” in that there are millions of pages of regulations, each imposing their own unique costs and hurdles on different businesses. In fact, according the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a 2014 the National Association of Manufacturers report pegged the 2012 total annual regulatory costs in the economy to $2.028 trillion (in 2014 dollars). Earlier governmental assessments from the Office of Management and Budget, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and the Small Business Administration (SBA) have also found aggregate annual costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars, some well in excess of $1 trillion dollars.
The last time the SBA published a comprehensive assessment of regulation, they identified regulatory compliance costs of $1.75 trillion in 2008. It’s practically taxation by another name.
President Donald Trump has dealt with excessive regulation in his entire career as a businessman, and while the media bemoans his “lack of major legislative achievements,” he’s done a huge amount of good for American industry in taking an axe to regulation behind the scenes.
It wasn’t long after taking office that Trump signed executive orders halting all new and pending federal regulations, while requiring two to be repealed for every new regulation added. In fact, the rate at which new regulations have been approved has declined ninety-percent this year.
Furthermore, the cost of new regulations anually dropped from an average of $26 billion historically, to only $33 million, or a microscopic 0.12 percent of the average.
And when it comes to the repeal of regulations, for the first time since an anomaly in 2001, there more regulations being removed than added.
Oh – and he’s just getting started.
According to USA Today,
President Trump vowed to step up his war on government regulations, saying his ultimate goal is to shrink the Code of Federal Regulations to its 1960 size.
“The never-ending growth of red tape in America has come to a sudden, screeching and beautiful halt,” Trump said. “We’re going to cut a ribbon because we’re getting back below the 1960 level, and we’ll be there fairly quickly.”
In a White House photo op, Trump took a pair of gold scissors to a ribbon linking two mounds of paper — one representing regulations as they existed in 1960 and the other representing today’s code.
The 1960 code: about 20,000 pages. Today: more than 185,000.
And that initiative to repeal two regulations for every one created? More from USA Today: “On Thursday, Trump claimed that the initiative has exceeded his expectations, with 67 regulations rescinded and just three adopted — a ratio of 22 to 1. And he claimed that repealing those old regulations has saved $8.1 billion in regulatory costs on businesses.”
So far, so good!
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