Strangling Entrepreneurship and Job Creation with $1.75 Trillion of Regulation and Red Tape

A new study from the Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy concludes that annual regulatory costs jumped by nearly $600 billion between 2005 and 2008. Thanks to the Obama Administration's big-government agenda, the burden of red tape today doubtlessly is much higher, but the 2008 estimate is enough to generate some very sobering numbers. A $1.75 trillion regulatory cost works out to be more than $15,500 for every household and more than $8,000 for every employee in the country. Red tape is especially challenging for smaller firms, as noted in these key findings from the summary:

The research finds that the total costs of federal regulations have further increased from the level established in the 2005 study, as have the costs per employee. More specifically, the total cost of federal regulations has increased to $1.75 trillion, while the updated cost per employee for firms with fewer than 20 employees is now $10,585 (a 36 percent difference between the costs incurred by small firms when compared with their larger counterparts).

To be sure, some forms of regulation, such as environmental protection, generate benefits. There generally are not good estimates needed to produce cost-benefit analyses, but it is quite likely that the costs are much higher than necessary - particularly for economic regulation, the burden of which is more than three times larger than the costs of environmental regulation.