Is this some sort of joke? In 2011, President Barack Obama ordered federal agencies to find “outdated, ineffective, insufficient, or excessively burdensome” regulations. Here are the results, according to the American Action Forum:
In 2011, agencies finalized $187 million in deregulatory actions, and proposed more than $1.1 billion in rescissions. The largest regulatory measure, CMS’s “Reform of Hospital and Critical Access,” could save $942 million and 9.6 million hours, but the action will not become final until 2012.
Hey, let’s be generous. Let’s give them that $942 million measure for a grand total of $1.1 billion in regulatory savings. Unfortunately, those deregulatory actions were slightly offset by the cost of new rules:
For proposed or final rules, the administration published $231.4 billion in regulatory burdens and 133 million paperwork burden hours. Assuming a 2,000 work year, it would take 66,730 employees just to file federal paperwork.
In addition, more than 20.3 million of those hours had no associated cost estimate. Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) mean hourly wage for federal “compliance officer” of $29.88, the unassociated labor costs of federal regulations actually total $608.41 million. Thus, the total published regulatory burden for 2011 is closer to $232 billion.
So, the feds found $1 billion in unnecessary regulations, but then added $232 billion in new ones? Like these?
None of this provides any evidence that this administration takes seriously America’s growth problem. Instead, the priority seems to be pushing a preexisting agenda, particularly an environmental one.
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