The Patriot Post® · What's Worse Than Taxes? Regulation U.S.A.

On Thursday, the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced a recall of an axe made by the Portland-based outdoor company Snow Peak. The axe, billed as Japanese Axe M, sold for about $160 dollars and was recalled because “[t]he handle of the axe can crack, allowing the axe head to come loose, posing a laceration or impact hazard to the user or bystanders.”

Wooden handles can crack. Common sense. But because in some worst-case scenario someone could get cut, the government commission pulled the plug on the product.

What? You haven’t heard of this axe? You’re not alone, because the company only sold 220. After what possibly could have been years of development and tens of thousands of dollars in investment, a federal commission with “safety” as its middle name decided Snow Peak’s axe should not be sold.

Welcome to Regulation U.S.A., where government’s meddling in the minute details in the lives of its citizens encroach ever closer with a stroke of a pen, and there is no real oversight of the overseers.

The problem is large and affects every one of us. In the last week, both The Heritage Foundation and Competitive Enterprise Institute released papers studying the burden the executive branch’s regulations have on Americans. CEI’s study, written by Vice President for Policy Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., found that the cost of complying with federal regulations cost Americans and businesses $1.88 trillion — a figure roughly equivalent to what the IRS collects in taxes every year.

Averaged out, this number costs households $14,976. If Regulation U.S.A. was its own country, it would beat out India’s economy, be the world’s 10th largest economy and rest just behind Russia in terms of economic might. Remember: That’s the money spent by the economy to go through the federal government’s hoops.

Heritage Foundation’s James Gattuso and Diane Katz write in their study that Barack Obama’s contribution to the regulatory burden through major regulations alone costs the nation $80 billion per year.

It’s easy for the government to slap up some new regulations because the question of funding — which has never been a real concern of the government, given the state of the national debt — is stripped away. Plus, the executive branch doesn’t need to go through Congress. In CEI’s 2014 report on the state of regulations, Crews wrote, “The government can also ‘fund’ objectives and programs through regulatory compliance, without using tax dollars. Rather than pay directly and book expenses for new initiatives, federal regulations can force the private sector, as well as state and local governments, to bear the costs of federal initiatives.”

Gattuso and Katz report that the Obama administration is already considering a battery of new rules — 126 economically significant ones to be exact — that will regulate the cultivation of fruits and vegetables and redesign of light bulbs, for example.

Look no further than the government’s complete ban on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in 2008 to see how regulations are already hurting Americans. Although the U.S. wanted to protect the ozone layer, CFC’s used to be the propellant in albuterol inhalers — the device used by people with asthma. But because of the ban, if one of the 20 million Americans who have asthma wants an inhaler, they need to buy a more expensive name-brand inhaler whose technology is under patent. As a result, fewer Americans are using inhalers, according to Reuters. Reducing health care options and birthing a government-created monopoly? Thanks, regulation!

Furthermore, Regulation U.S.A. is a tough place to run a small business, the institutions Obama calls the “backbone of our economy.” In his Earth Day essay, Mark Alexander wrote about Erick, the restaurateur of our staff’s favorite local establishment, who employees 13 people. Erick’s grease trap is not EPA approved, and complying will cost him in the ballpark of $17,000 — a cost that could sink him, as Erick doesn’t have the capital and lawyers that a large restaurant chain would have.

Does this government sound like an institution that ensures the economic wellbeing of the country? Not when it’s busy regulating what kind of light bulbs its citizens use, how many gallons their toilets can flush or what kinds of grease traps a restaurant needs.

As the authors of both studies point out, Congress needs to ultimately be the body that crafts the law, as the Constitution dictates (though that didn’t help with light bulbs or toilets). There needs to be more transparency, accountability and a way for someone to review regulation, writes Crews. Gattuso and Katz point to the proposed REINS Act as a vehicle for curbing the glut of regulation.

April’s job numbers indicate that America’s economy sputtered along for yet another month. What if a fraction of the regulations were gone? What if that money went to building the economy instead of paying the tax of the regulatory commissars? More freedom and a better economy, that’s what.