Strangled By Red Tape

Townhall.com ^ | May 21, 2013 | Daniel J. Mitchell

[Kaslin]

I’ve shared some nightmare stories of excessive and mindless government regulation.

1. The Food and Drug Administration raiding a dairy for the terrible crime of selling unpasteurized milk to people who prefer unpasteurized milk.
2. New York City imposing a $30,000 fine on a small shop because it sold a toy gun.
3. The pinheads at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission going after Hooters for not having any male waiters in hot pants and tight t-shirts.
4. Indiana’s Department of Natural Resources is legally attacking a family for rescuing a baby deer.
5. An unlucky guy who is in legal hot water for releasing some heart-shaped balloons to impress his sweetheart.

But the regulatory burden goes way beyond these odd anecdotes. We’re talking about a huge cost to the economy, and it’s been getting worse for the past 12 years.

Here are some comments on the President’s inauspicious record from the Wall Street Journal.

Team Obama is now the red tape record holder. …pages in the Code of Federal Regulations hit an all-time high of 174,545 in 2012, an increase of more than 21% during the last decade…the cost of federal rules exceeded $1.8 trillion, roughly equal to the GDP of Canada. These costs are embedded in nearly everything Americans buy…at $14,768 per household, meaning that red tape is now the second largest item in the typical family budget after housing. Last year 4,062 regulations were at various stages of implementation inside the Beltway. The government completed work on 1,172, an increase of 16% over the 1,010 that the feds imposed in 2011, which was a 40% increase over 722 in 2010. …the Obama Administration did not break the all-time record of 81,405 pages it set in 2010. But the 78,961 pages it churned out in 2012 mean that the President has posted three of the four greatest paperwork years on record. And to be fair, if Mr. Obama were ever to acknowledge that this is a problem, he could reasonably blame George W. Bush for setting a lousy example. Despite the Obama myth that the Bush years were an era of deregulation, the Bush Administration routinely generated more than 70,000 pages a year in the Federal Register.

If those numbers don’t make you sit up and take notice, how about these ones?

• Americans spend 8.8 billion hours every year filling out government forms.
• The economy-wide cost of regulation is now $1.75 trillion.
• For every bureaucrat at a regulatory agency, 100 jobs are destroyed in the economy’s productive sector.
• The Obama Administration added $236 billion of red tape just in 2012.

My personal “favorite,” as you can imagine, is the regulatory burden of the income tax.

1. The number of pages in the tax code.
2. The number of special tax breaks.
3. The number of pages in the 1040 instruction booklet.

Today’s Byzantine system is good for tax lawyers, accountants, and bureaucrats, but it’s bad news for America. We need to wipe the slate clean and get rid of this corrupt mess. And you know how to make that happen.

[Mr. K]

great post!

[aimhigh]

Nothing to see here. Just the liberal Democrat administration making sure the big corporations have no competition.

[Rennes Templar]

“The only answer, needless to say, is to throw the entire mess in the trash can and replace it with a simple and fair flat tax.”

[arthurus]

The more regulation there is the more corruption there is. It is a natural law of government. When you have to get something okayed by a bureaucrat then the market is being hampered.The bureaucrat does not have to provide efficient service to get paid and he can get paid more by delaying or putting more snags in your project unless you satisfy him over and above the bare rules, which might be ambiguous in the first place. Government inspectors and bureaucrats who issue permits for this and that, especially for business and construction like to have their lawns mowed and their cars washed at the lowest level and like airline tickets and garages to be added to their homes at a higher level etc, and sometimes substantial addition to their net worth.

You cannot reduce corruption by adding a level of anticorruption overseers because the nature of their function puts them in position to demand a portion of the rake-off in order to sign off on what the people they are overseeing are doing. The more layers the more corruption.

[Taxman]

May I remind you that the so-called “Flat Tax” is still an income tax, and will require that the IRS stay in place? I can make the case that the IRS would be even more aggressive under the Flat Tax regime than it is today.

The FairTax, on the other hand, abolishes the IRS! It is true that a Federal agency would be stood up to monitor each state’s tax collection activities. However, the Feds would have no interaction with private citizens or businesses; they would only be able interact with state sales tax agencies.

A much leaner, cleaner, cheaper and, of great import, far less intrusive system.

See http://www.fairtax.org for more information.

[MHGinTN]

So long as the private banking cabal euphemistically known as the federal reserve is the source of money by fiat loan to the Treasury (fiat because they create the loan out of thin air), how the tax revenues collected to post to the federal reserve balance sheet is actually irrelevant. Abolish the federal reserve and have the tresury issue our money, then you can fix things by using a fair tax or sales tax or flat tax. If the US Treasury issues our money, even the present IRS would not prevent our moving to solvency.

American dollars are created by debt issuance. So we the people will never get out of debt so long as the private banking cabal issues our debt for monetary exchange.

[Hostage]

A Flat Tax never stays flat.

Here’s the lasting solution:
http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer?pagename=FAQs

[GeronL]

The Fairtax would require an invasive national bureaucracy and I would hate to see how they enforce it. Plus it preserves making the ‘rich’ give bonuses to the ‘poor’ and a ot of other crap. and the prebate is most idiotic thing ever devised

[Hostage]

Well you haven’t taken the time to understand the FairTax including its Rebate.

Let’s say you thought of the idea to eliminate the income tax and to replace a means of generating federal government revenue by a tax on retail spending.

But say further you wanted to ensure that no American would pay any federal tax on essentials of living. How would you suggest this be done?

[narses]

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[Big Giant Head]

One of the BEST things about the Fair tax is that in gives the power of taxation back to the People. If we don’t like what’s going on in DC, we can vote with our dollars.

The Fair Tax incentivizes the Federal Government to get the hell out of the way and let the economy grow, thus leading to more tax revenue. Real jobs must be created for the growth of tax revenue to appear.

The WORST thing about the FAIR TAX is that is doesn’t address the massive overspending. What needs to happen is that there needs to be a spending priority list based on the Constitutionally proscribed Federal powers, along with language preventing spending more than is taken in on penalty of removal, and criminal charges. Lock the tax rate.

[HANG THE EXPENSE]

Fairtax is the only thing that makes sense.

[scottteng]

The prebate is the genius of the whole system if we use it to replace all other forms of welfare ie Social security, ssdi, ssi, afdc, food stamps, farm subsidies etc every US citizen will get their check and that amount should be set as the official poverty line. Everyone would be free to work and spend every dollar buying taxed stuff or saving. We could have open borders all who came would pay taxes without any prebate. The taxes generated on the underground (under the table) workers would help as well.

[GeronL]

Insanity. Leftists/GOPEs would extend it to illegals too.

Crazy.

[GeronL]

The prebate is ridiculous. It is not a good replacement for the income tax, it sounds exactly like the income tax turned into a welfare program

[Hostage]

The tax rebate is set to rebate on spending at a level for the essentials of living. Grandparents on Social Security will get $196 monthly as a tax rebate for taxes paid in monthly spending. So will Warren Buffett and Bill Gates III receive the same $196 per month.

It’s the same tax rebate for everyone and it can’t be changed because of the uniformity clause of the US Constitution; same as social security taxes have to be uniform. The FairTax calls for repeal of the 16th Amendment and abolishes the Income Tax code. Therefore, it is impossible to rebate one person more than another.

The difference between a social security pensioner and a wealthy person is that it will leave Social Security beneficiaries about 100% untaxed whereas for Warren Buffett and his class it won’t even reach a 1% tax rebate in terms of their spending. So in terms of a percentage of spending there is a difference but not in the actual nominal amounts.

Let me ask again: if you wanted to design a federal tax system that never taxes any American on the essentials of living, how would you see that it could be done?

[GeronL]

It’s a minimum guaranteed income. I can drop out and other FReepers will pay for my living expenses. Nice for me.

It is a socialist dream come true.

[PeterPrinciple]

Remember when the Paper Work Reduction Act was going to stop all this?

[Hostage]

Nonsense. You can’t live on $196 per month.

The $196 amount is a rebate on taxes, it represents a cut in taxes, a return in taxes already paid for the month. It has nothing to do with socialism. Conservatives are for tax cuts and the tax rebate is a tax cut. Trying to twist a tax cut into some sort of socialist scheme is absurd.

I’ll ask a third time: to guarantee that AMERICANS PAY NO FEDERAL TAXES on spending below the level of essentials of living (the poverty line), how do you suggest it be done?