Regulations and Jobs
The rapid explosion of rules, regulations and red tape that has taken place over the last several years has become a serious problem for our country.
A 2008 study by the Small Business Administration put the cost of just federal regulations at an astounding $1.75 trillion, or a cost of $10,500 per employee, per year. And regulations have greatly increased in almost every business and industry since then.
Confirming that, another study in 2009 by the Competitive Enterprise Institute said the cost for federal regulatory compliance had reached $1.2 trillion for businesses.
Nearly 60,000 federal rules have been issued since 1995, and regulatory agencies issued more than 3,500 final rules in 2009 alone.
Today’s Code of Federal Regulations contains more than 150,000 pages.
According to another study by the SBA in 2010, federal rules and regulations now cost the average family more than $15,000 a year.
George Mason University put out a report that said U.S. regulations “are now more onerous than those in other countries, particularly countries that offer similar property rights and infrastructure,’’ and that “the United States risks losing investment capital and jobs.”
The “jobs bill” the President pushed would kill more jobs than it creates. This is proven by the big stimulus bill that was such a failure that the Administration instructed its people to not use the word “stimulus” when describing it.
The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, which works for both sides, said the stimulus bill cost $228,000 per job created. In the private sector, it is generally estimated that a job is created for every $50,000 on average.
I attended an Aspen Institute breakfast recently where Edward Rendell, the former Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania, estimated that a highway bill would create 25,000 jobs for each one billion, or $40,000 per job. This is because most of the money would go to private companies.
There is waste in the private sector, but it pales in comparison to the waste in government. The most inefficient way to spend money is to turn it over to the federal government.
The House has passed dozens of bills to increase jobs and energy production in the private sector, but the majority in the Senate has refused to take them up.
