Eric Boehm
During the final year of the Obama administration, federal regulations drained more than $1.9 trillion (about $15,000 per family) out of Americans' wallets, and the number of rules created by the federal government grew to an all-time high. It's no surprise that President Donald Trump's election was due, in
part, to his promise to "drain the swamp" and slash the federal
regulatory state, which had grown to never-before-seen levels during the
last 16 years under the watch of both Democratic and Republican
administrations. The latest annual regulatory report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute,
a free market think tank based in Washington, D.C., provides a sense of
the scale of that federal regulatory state—and, perhaps more
importantly, provides a benchmark against which to measure Trump's
efforts to cut red tape. The size of the federal regulatory burden is almost too large to
conceptualize, but if you're willing to try, here's a few numbers you
should know. The $1.9 trillion price tag for all federal regulations and
interventions during 2016 is roughly equal to the $1.93 trillion in
personal and corporate income taxes collected by the IRS, according to
the CEI report. The Federal Registry, that behemoth of a book that
annually tracks the growth of the federal leviathan, had more than
95,000 pages added to it in 2016, far outpacing the previous record (set
just one year earlier) of 80,260 pages. Including last year's
record-breaker, 13 of the 15 longest registers in American history have
been authored by the past two presidential administrations (Barack Obama
owns seven of the top eight, with George W. Bush filling in most of the
rest). So far, Trump is on pace to fall well short of those totals in 2017—and that's just fine...more
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
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