From the Washington Examiner: Current federal regulations plus those coming
under Obamacare will cost American taxpayers and businesses $1.8
trillion annually, more than twenty times the $88 billion the
administration estimates, according to a new roundup provided to Secrets
from the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute.
And it could grow, warned the author of the report, Clyde Wayne Crews, a CEI vice president.
Complying with Health and Human Services
Department requirements alone, he revealed, costs $184 billion a year,
yet regulators are still drafting the rules for the 2,400-page Obamacare
law that kicks into gear in 2014.
Crews has made a working project of his "Tip of the Costberg"
report which he regularly updates. In it, he compares the cost of
regulations estimated by federal agencies to a much broader list of
estimates from multiple federal and independent sources. And even then,
he said, it doesn't include hard-to-calculate costs associated with
antitrust intervention, regulation of electricity networks, or the cost
of constrained access to natural resources.
"While OMB officially reports amounts of only
up to $88.6 billion in 2010 dollars," said Crews, "the non-tax cost of
government intervention in the economy, without performing a sweeping
survey, appears to total up to $1.806 trillion annually."
But, he added, "according to back of the
envelope surveys and roundups, with gaps big enough to fit the beltway
through, that up to $1.806 trillion annually and in many categories
perhaps even considerably more, is a defensible assessment of the annual
impact on the economy."
His estimate is close to the $1.7 trillion
estimate from the Small Business Administration which the White House
distanced itself from. For comparison, the total U.S. GDP is $15
trillion. http://washingtonexaminer.com/1.8-trillion-shock-obama-regs-cost-20-times-estimate/article/2508466#.UF4KB648VXs
I don't know what's worse, all the regulations or the fact that the Obama administration doesn't know how to count.
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