Government policies take a big hit out of Americans' wallets every year, from monetary policy, to inflation, to taxes. But the biggest burden Uncle Sam places on our bank accounts is in the form of government regulations. That's the conclusion of the annual Ten Thousand Commandments report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which examines the federal regulatory state. This year's report estimates the total cost of regulations on the economy at just shy of $2 trillion. "That breaks down at the household level to about $14,000 a year, which is bigger than anything in the family budget except for housing," says Clyde Wayne Crews, CEI fellow and the report's author.
These government regulations are built in to almost all legislation and every government agency, and are often passed and administered by unelected bureaucrats. Just in the past year, they include Biden administration rules on household appliances and EPA regulations on land use. "We're talking about economic regulations, health and safety, financial, environmental, even paperwork costs and things like that," says Crews.
Crews is calling on Congress to step in and rein in the administrative state, by demanding more accountability and insisting the legislative branch approve any federal regulations that are onerous or cost-prohibitive to businesses or individuals. But instead, Congress has too often signed off on the regulatory state in recent years. "We've had the CARES Act, the American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure Act, the CHIPS and Science Act...all of those big-spending bills are also highly regulatory," says Crews. "And I can see an uptick in the number of significant regulations that are affecting small business and affecting state and local governments."
Crews hopes that impact on small business and local governments will spur a new push for long-overdue regulatory reform at the federal level. "That could be things like setting a regulatory budget, a regulatory reduction commission, sunsetting regulations automatically, or at least just mapping the stuff," he says. "I mean, we can look up what the federal debt is, but we can't really do the same thing for regulations."