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Last week, 88 new final rules were published, up from 32 the previous week.

That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every 1 hour and 54 minutes — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

All in all, 3,392 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year.

If this keeps up, the total tally for 2012 will be 3,706 new rules.

Last week, 1,849 new pages were added to the 2012 Federal Register, for a total of 71,120 pages.

At its current pace, the 2012 Federal Register will run 76,970 pages.

Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. The 45 such rules published so far in 2012 have compliance costs of at least $24 billion. Two of the rules do not have cost estimates, and two other rules have cost estimates that do 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.

No economically significant rules were published last week.

So far, 321 final rules that meet the broader definition of “significant” have been published in 2012.

So far this year, 632 final rules affect small business; 90 of them are significant rules.

Read more.