The Staggering Price of Red Tape Regulation

RightWingPatriot.com ^ | December 6, 2013 | RightWingPatriot

[rightwingerpatriot]

America is being strangled in red tape by bureaucracies. I've talked in the past about how progressive liberals are circumventing the legislative process by issuing government regulations with no oversight and no accountability. Yet us poor serfs are liable to be fined or imprisoned if we run afoul of the imperial edicts. The latest example is how the EPA is shutting down the last remaining lead smelter in the USA at the end of the year, which will have a disastrous impact upon the cost and availability of ammunition. If progressives can't pass gun control laws, then they'll go behind everybody's backs and just red tape them away. Now a dollar amount that such over-regulations cost America has come out and it isn't pretty. According to the Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy, complying with federal regulations cost businesses $1.75 billion dollars a year. That's over 10% of the entire US economy!

To make matters worse, that number is just the tip of the iceberg. That $1.75 billion dollars is just the impact upon businesses. Just imagine how much taxpayer money is also wasted by state and federal governments to comply with all that massive red tape. Another consideration is that this amount is only for complying with federal regulations, not state or local ones. I shudder to think how much money is being wasted complying with a vast majority of useless, onerous regulations. The impact upon the US economy is enormous in that every dollar spent on compliance is a dollar that doesn't go to hire new workers, research new products, or manufacture goods. The ripple effect of over-regulation is enormous, akin to a elephant plummeting from a thousand foot freefall into a child's wading pool. In both cases, the results aren't pretty.

What makes this massive waste of money even more insane is when you compare it to previous federal budgets of years gone by. In 1996, the federal budget was $1.6 trillion and remained the same in 1997. The federal budget rose to $1.7 trillion in 1998, remained the same in 1999, and then rose to $1.8 trillion in the year 2000. The current federal budget is $3.8 trillion (up from $2.8 trillion in 2008). (Must be nice to never worry about balancing the checkbook as big government just prints more money or squeezes taxpayers into making hard decisions.)

The sad fact remains that not only are our liberties being undermined by excessive regulation (heavily promoted by President Obama) through federal bureaucracies, but what little money we're able to keep is being sucked up (directly and indirectly) by being forced to comply with mountains of red tape. To paraphrase Pharaoh from The Ten Commandments, "So let it be regulated, so let them be taxed!" We have to be our own Moses and proclaim to the big government worshippers to let the American people go and be free once again.

[Venturer]

The laws are nothing. It’s the regulations made up by some half wit in a office somewhere that are the killers.

Some penis head who often knows nothing about what he is dealing with in the first place.

[Gen.Blather]

I’ve worked for several large companies and it’s not unusual to burn 500 hours at various rates getting ready for a guy from any one of a dozen alphabet soup government organizations to “inspect.” And, almost any of them can shut you down of they think there’s a puddle of something they don’t like on the floor. Five hundred hours can easily translate to $25,000 or more. Do that a couple of times a year and you’re talking money. Also, there are people on staff to deal with them and those people cost around $100k or more per year.