Regulations are strangling small business and forcing those impacted to figure them out, instead of focusing on their production of goods and services. Instead of passing new regulations, which have huge costs; policy makers, politicians, and bureaucrats should be doing the exact opposite and repealing regulations.
- first week in October: 88 new final rules were published, up from 71 the previous week.
- That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every 1 hour and 55 minutes — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
- All in all, 2,949 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year.
- If this keeps up, the total tally for 2012 will be 3,868 new rules.
- Last week, 1519 new pages were added to the 2012 Federal Register, for a total of 61,135 pages.
- At its current pace, the 2012 Federal Register will run 78,783 pages.
- Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. The 40 such rules published so far in 2012 have compliance costs of at least $17.4 billion. Two of the rules do not have cost estimates, and a third cost estimate does not give a total annual cost. We assume that rules lacking this basic transparency measure cost the bare minimum of $100 million per year. The true cost is almost certainly higher.
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