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Well, last week [Cass Sunstein] took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to crow that dairy farmers will henceforth be exempted from the burdens of a 1970s EPA-era directive classifying milk as an "oil" and subjecting it, as Professor Sunstein typed with a straight face, "to costly rules designed to prevent oil spills."
in New York City, applying for the "right" to open a restaurant requires dealing with the conflicting demands of at least 11 municipal agencies, plus submitting to 23 city inspections and applying for 30 different permits and certificates. Not including the state liquor license.Recognizing that this could all get very complicated, the city set up a new bureaucratic body to help you negotiate your way through all the other bureaucratic bodies.
Plucked at random from the ObamaCare bill: "The Secretary shall develop oral healthcare components that shall include tooth-level surveillance.""Tooth-level surveillance"? Has that phrase ever been used before in the entirety of human history? Say what you like about George III, but the redcoats never attempted surveillance of Gen. Washington's dentures. Why not just call it "gum control"?
And yet Americans put up with it. According to the Small Business Administration, the cost to the economy of government regulation is about $1.75 trillion per annum. You and your fellow citizens pay for that — and it's about twice as much as you pay in income tax.Or, put another way, the regulatory state sucks up about a quarter-trillion dollars more than India's entire GDP. As fast as India's growing its economy, we're growing our regulations faster.
As my fellow columnists Charles Krauthammer and Victor Davis Hanson like to point out, decline is not inevitable; it is a choice. The voters of New York's 26th District chose it just the other day, presumably on the basis that it will be relatively pleasant, as it has been in certain parts of Continental Europe.But genteel Franco-Italian decline is not on the menu. As those numbers suggest, the scale of American decay is entirely different: $1.75 trillion in regulatory costs, $1 trillion in college debt, $4.5 billion spent by Washington every single day that we don't have, 70% of which the U.S. government "borrows" from itself because nobody else wants to lend it to us — and a governing party whose Senate leader boasts about not passing a budget and whose Medicare plan is not to have a plan at all and whose crusading regulatory reformer's greatest triumph is getting Daisy the cow moved out of the same federal classification as the Exxon Valdez.
