The Cost of Regulations

by Craig Eyermann

How much does the average American household spend to cover the cost of government regulations?

Answering that question can be difficult, because Americans pay that cost every time they make any kind of transaction. Because it’s a cost of doing business, it gets directly passed along to every consumer and is incorporated into the cost of everything you might buy.

But it’s not an impossible question to answer. Mark Tapscott describes how one economist calculated the cost of regulations on American household consumers:

Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute provides a definitive answer to that question today with publication of the latest edition of his annual compilation, “10,000 Commandments: An annual snapshot of the federal regulatory state.”

Crews estimates the annual cost of compliance with the record number of new federal rules and regulations issued under President Obama at $1.863 trillion.

That works out to a $14,974 “hidden tax” every year for the average U.S. household. That’s 23 percent of the $65,596 annual average household income in America.

Most regulations are developed to achieve one goal: to make it too costly for potential competitors to today’s dominant business interests to compete with them, which allows those dominant business interests to keep their prices higher than they otherwise could and maintain their dominant position. Politicians in both parties go along with the scheme because their corporate cronies take some of that extra money to support their political and personal interests.

That’s how “public servants” get rich.