You Are A Law-Breaker

You break the law every day.

I am not impugning you by making this claim. I don’t know, at least with certainty, that you are a lawbreaker. But the probabilities are extremely high that my claim is correct. Furthermore, you likely do so several times per day and don’t even know it.

The regulatory burden on the US economy is so great that no one can possibly know (or obey) all the laws and regulations. This cost of regulation is difficult to quantify, some have attempted to do so. The estimates generally exceed $1 trillion per annum. Obviously any such calculation is rather subjective and dependent upon many assumptions.

A more objective way to measure regulations is in terms of the number of new pages added per year by the federal government. The chart below shows this number by year:

This chart is not cumulative. It represents the pages of new regulations per year. Matters appeared reasonable (if you consider 20,000 pages per year reasonable) up until 1970. Then regulators accelerated their assault on liberty.

As an aside, most everything can be traced back to around this point in time. In 1971 the US left the gold standard although it is hard to connect regulatory overreach to this event. Perhaps removing the constraints of honest money may have emboldened the political class in other areas.

H/T to Political Calculations for the chart and their commentary on what lies ahead, especially the increase expected next year:

The reason why is because of ObamaCare, where the recent Supreme Court decision allowing the law to go into effect will require the federal government to issue a very large number of new rules and regulations before next year:

With the Supreme Court giving President Obama’s new health care law a green light, federal and state officials are turning to implementation of the law — a lengthy and massive undertaking still in its early stages, but already costing money and expanding the government.The Health and Human Services Department “was given a billion dollars implementation money,” Republican Rep. Denny Rehberg of Montana said. “That money is gone already on additional bureaucrats and IT programs, computerization for the implementation.”

“Oh boy,” Stan Dorn of the Urban Institute said. “HHS has a huge amount of work to do and the states do, too. There will be new health insurance marketplaces in every state in the country, places you can go online, compare health plans.”

The IRS, Health and Human Services and many other agencies will now write thousands of pages of regulations — an effort well under way:

“There’s already 13,000 pages of regulations, and they’re not even done yet,” Rehberg said.

We anticipate that most of the new rules and regulations related to the implementation of ObamaCare will be issued after the 6 November 2012 election, mainly to avoid drawing an even more negative response from voters beforehand. So add *that* to your fiscal cliff to worry about in 2013!

Tags: Health, law, Regulations, Rules And Regulations, Services, Supreme Court, US