Counting All the U.S. Government's Regulations

Townhall.com ^ | October 21, 2012 | Political Calculations

[Kaslin]

The Mercatus Center has launched a new web app, RegData:

The Mercatus Center at George Mason University is proud to announce the launch of a breakthrough database that provides a dramatically improved measure of the federal regulatory burden.

RegData is the first database to count the actual number of restrictions in the Code of Federal Regulations, as opposed to the former method of simply counting total pages. The interactive tool enables a far more focused view of the regulatory burden by measuring the growth of regulation by industry. While previous methods provided an idea of the growth of overall regulation, they told nothing about how those regulations affected specific sectors in the economy.

Here are the results in looking at the growth in the total number of regulations since 1997:

In 1997, there were 834,949 instances of the words "may not", "must", "prohibited", "required" and "shall" in the Federal Register, which coincide with each single rule implemented by the U.S. federal government.

By 2010, that number had risen to 1,001,153, an increase of 16.6% in 13 years. Or if you prefer, an average rate of increase of 12,808 per year.

For the preceding 208 years, going back to 1789, the average rate of increase of regulations in the U.S. was just 4,013 per year.

The RegData database can also break down the data by industry or by type of regulation - the only real limitation we see is that it only covers data from 1997 onward. All in all, pretty cool!

Labels: review, tool

[ModelBreaker]

Thanks for posting this. Interesting that things took off about when W was elected. Linear trend thru both W and Obama administrations.

The sample size pre-W is really too small to see the pre-W trend. But it certainly supports conservatives contention that W was not a conservative. In this regard, he was no better or worse than the worst president of the last 100 years.

[Texas Fossil]

Counting All the U.S. Government’s Regulations (Death by million paper cuts)

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2948019/posts

Duplicate, but you did a better job of posting by including the graph.

TNX

[Kaslin]

You are welcome

[IronJack]

I've often said that the average American citizen has probably broken 10 laws before he's finished breakfast. There is literally no area of our lives that isn't regulated in some way, from the amount of water we can use to flush our toilets, to the light bulbs we use in our homes, to the amount of soda we can buy.

Does anyone believe that our Founders envisioned a government this intrusive? How can we still call ourselves a free people?

[adorno]

But it certainly supports conservatives contention that W was not a conservative.

Perhaps it might be better to study the kinds of regulations, rather than the total number of regulations imposed during any one administration.

For example, a regulation that says something along the line of "government shall not", might be a positive rather than a negative, yet, it's considered a regulation that is counted for the total number of regulations imposed, without analyzing the merits, or lack thereof, of that regulation.

I'm not excusing what Bush did, and I certainly won't excuse what Obama has done, but, solely counting words or phrases or number of regulations, might not be a good way to judge those regulations and the people who imposed/voted for them.

For the most part, I do believe that most regulations are not needed and just present hurdles to the people and the economy and the country in general.

[redpoll]

>>>I’m not excusing what Bush did, and I certainly won’t excuse what Obama has done, but, solely counting words or phrases or number of regulations, might not be a good way to judge those regulations and the people who imposed/voted for them.<<<

The word count is an inexact measure of bureaucrat excess. However, it’s a good enough metaphor for me. I’d call Bush a benign statist, with Obama acting as an activist statist. In either case, the state is used to affect change in personal behavior.

Nice nom de plume, by the way. I’m a teacher up here in the Alaska Bush, so I recognize one of the Marxists from the Columbia Teacher’s College. I’m sure he’s dancing with Thorndike and Dewey somewhere in hell. Assuming they recognize it’s hell.

[adorno]

Nice nom de plume

Actually, it's not a "nom de plume".

Adorno may have been a communist, but, I had no choice in what went into my BC.

I have no problem with my name, and it's the communism which I have a problem with.

[redpoll]

Good morning wherever you are.... I agree with you about the communism. I’d say the seeds of the destruction of our schools starts with that little group of educators at Columbia and, as Dewey put it, their attempt to create “the new man.” Add Gramscii to the mix and it’s quite a toxic little cocktail.

In any case, I didn’t mean to diss you in any way. My apologies if it was taken that way.

[adorno]

In any case, I didn’t mean to diss you in any way. My apologies if it was taken that way.

No apology needed, since, I never took offense with what you said.