Tag: Federal Regulations

by Michael Bastasch   The federal regulatory apparatus imposed a roughly $14,600 “hidden tax” on American households last year, according to a new report by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). “That amounts to 20 percent of the average pretax income of $73,573, and 24 percent of the average expenditure budget of $60,060,” CEI’s Wayne Crews wrote in his annual Ten Thousand Commandments report released Tuesday. In total, federal regulations, once again, cost the U.S. economy $1.9 trillion despite the Trump administration’s effort to roll back onerous regulations. Crews said his report was a conservative estimate of the true cost of regulations. “The regulatory ‘tax’ exceeds every item in the household budget except housing,” Crews wrote. “More is ‘spent’ on embedded regulation than on health care, food, transportation, entertainment, apparel, services, and savings.” One of President Donald Trump’s first actions upon taking office was to rein in federal agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), that had issued billions of dollars worth of regulations during the Obama administration. And Trump’s had some success, according to Crews. Crews reported that Trump will cut regulatory costs about $50 billion by the end of 2019, and his administration issued 3,368 rules in 2018. The…