Editors at Issues and Insights explain why the current president will never oversee an economic resurgence.
Voters who think that putting Republicans in control of the House and Senate will make a big difference for the economy are in for a rude awakening. President Joe Biden has unleashed the regulatory Leviathan. Lawmakers will be hard-pressed to stop the damage.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) just this morning released its hugely valuable report called “10,000 Commandments,” which is a compendium of the regulatory state. In it, CEI Vice President for Policy Clyde Wayne Crews lays out the terrible truth about Biden’s regulatory zeal.
The first thing you have to understand about federal regulation is how massive it already is, with compliance costs that total more than $1.9 trillion a year.
That’s bigger than Canada’s entire GDP. It’s bigger, in fact, than all but seven nations in the world. It works out to almost $15,000 per household.
And it is growing at a ferocious pace. From 1995 to last year, regulators issued a total of 114,821 new rules.
The cost of complying with this mountain of mandates is on top of the $6.3 trillion the feds spent this year, which means the true cost of government equals roughly a third of the nation’s economy.
Some Republican presidents have tried to whittle this down, but Democratic administrations always come into office well prepared to reinvigorate regulators.
Crews notes that Biden immediately started overturning Trump-era deregulatory directives, calling them “harmful policies and directives that threaten to frustrate the federal government’s ability to confront problems.”
Biden also issued an executive order that, as we pointed out on Jan. 29. 2021, was the worst of them all. It gutted the one minor speed bump in front of new regulations, namely that they had to be reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget and pass a basic cost-benefit analysis.
