Op-ed column: Entangling tape By David Schlosser, candidate for U.S. Congress
Week of 12th July 2006 http://www.schlosserforcongress.com/media-press/op-ed/060712_Entangling_tape .php A sage of Federal budgets once remarked that, with a billion here and billion there, you'd soon be talking real money. President Bush greeted this week with some real money, announcing that projections of this year's budget deficit suggest that the Federal government will spend only 296 billion of your dollars that it doesn't have, instead of the earlier projection that it would spend 423 billion dollars it doesn't have. That's real money. Sadly, it's chump change compared to a cost of Federal government that remains almost entirely hidden from view. Last month, the Competitive Enterprise Institute's annual report on Federal regulations estimated that - on top of taxes - regulations cost Americans $1.13 trillion in 2005. That's about half of the entire Federal budget. Combining Federal spending with the compliance costs of Federal regulation, Washington chewed up about one-third of America's economic output in 2005. The Wall Street Journal editorial page reported in May that, between 2001 and 2006, the Federal government added 66,000 regulatory staffers, an increase of one-third, in more than 50 departments and agencies. Inflation-adjusted budgets for regulatory creation and enforcement increased more than 50 percent. The number of pages of regulations grew by 10,000, to 78,000 pages detailing 241,000 regulations on virtually every aspect of your life and your business. To put the scope of regulations in context, their cost exceeded the $874 billion of before-tax corporate profits in 2005. It is equal to all the personal ($894 billion) and corporate ($226 billion) income taxes paid in 2005. Now consider the scope of regulation on a more personal scale: the Small Business Administration estimates that Federal regulations cost your household, and every other household in America, about $8,000 per year. At nearly 20 percent of median household income, paying for regulation consumes one-fifth of what the typical American household earns in a year. The SBA reports that companies with fewer than 500 employees - probably like where you work - spend $5,000 per employee every year just to comply with regulatory and tax paperwork. Companies with fewer than 50 employees - which create most of America's new jobs - spend about 20 percent of every dollar they earn on regulatory compliance. It would be a cheap shot to ask what you would do with a 20 percent raise. Certainly there are some regulations that do enough good to justify their existence. But that's difficult to say with certainty: Congress has never passed any legislation that requires comprehensive cost-benefit analyses of Federal regulations. Interestingly, this lack of accountability for the costs imposed by Federal regulations extends beyond the simple failure to determine whether the value of a regulation exceeds its cost. Our elected representatives don't actually write regulations - they pass vague laws that direct unelected bureaucrats to write regulations. Anyone who's ever had to stand in the security line while his plane is leaving without him can tell you about how accountable a Federal bureaucrat is. And, since it's our elected representatives deciding what laws get passed to require what regulations, you can be pretty confident that those laws and regulations have more to do with rewarding friends than actually serving or protecting you, your family, or your friends and neighbors. Like the news media during sweeps week, politicians are obsessively interested in scary events, no matter how unlikely they are to occur. Shark attacks, lighting strikes, and plane crashes are great for generating panic, but distract people and misallocate resources away from the things that really matter. Politicians and their bureaucrats seem very concerned about creating a risk-free society by regulating every little thing on which they can put a warning label, such as red garden hoses in California. They conveniently ignore tobacco subsidies. They suddenly get very busy when anyone points out the obvious correlation between the USDA's "food pyramid" and American obesity, subsidizing corporate agriculture that wants to sell a lot of the foods that are the most profitable to grow, the easiest to process, and the worst for the human body and the environment. Tobacco and obesity kill twenty times as many people as car wrecks. The volume of regulations is inversely proportional. Today's political system makes it unlikely that Congress will regulate the stuff that may need regulating. And if government does happen regulate something important, such as pharmaceuticals, it doesn't do a very good job. The FDA spent years studying anti-inflammatory drugs before approving them and learning that they cause heart disease. Americans were denied the value of those drugs while they were stuck in reviews; we were denied the data necessary to make an informed decision about whether and how long to use those drugs after the FDA approved them; and, now, the manufacturers can use government approval to defend themselves from lawsuits. Even when Federal regulation may make sense - as in the case of the environment, to prevent tragedies of our common air, land, and water, free-market solutions like cap-and-trade rules enabling the buying and selling of pollution credits work better than command-and-control regulations like mandates on particulate emissions. Ask yourself: when making a decision about buying a car, would you prefer to rely on the free-market resources of Consumer Reports, Kelley Blue Book, and Edmunds.com, or would you prefer to have a government report on cars? That is why I believe Congress should pass a law requiring cost-benefit calculations of existing and new regulations. Congress should use that analysis to hold an up-or-down vote on every regulation created as a result of the laws it passes. This would accomplish three things. First, it would make someone accountable for regulations that add billions of dollars to the cost of doing business and living in America. Second, it would finally allow people to see whether the value of a regulation is worth its cost. Third, and most important, it would force Congress to stop and think about all the laws it passes that have nothing to do with the limited and enumerated powers granted it by the US Constitution. # # # Libertarian candidate for U.S. Congress David Schlosser, 38, lives in Flagstaff, Ariz., where he is a public relations manager for a global microprocessor company and has been a part-time instructor in the School of Communications at Northern Arizona University. He brings nearly a decade of political experience to his campaign for Congress, and is a graduate of Trinity University and the University of Texas. His wife, Anne, is a corporate training and development professional. For more information about Schlosser and his campaign for Arizona's First Congressional District, visit www.SchlosserForCongress.com <http://www.schlosserforcongress.com/> . 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