Govt. regulations cost you, each and every day

T he other day, when I got ready to mow the lawn, I got out the old gas can I had inherited from my dad. It was a battered old tin can with a rubber spout and a vent hole on the opposite side. It worked perfectly for many decades, but I noticed that it was leaking around the seam on the bottom.

A trip to the local hardware store brought me a new, Epa-approved PFC (portable fluid container), also known as a gas can with a low-vapor pour spout. I quickly learned that you need three hands to operate today’s gas can. You spill more gas than you get in the tank.

What happened to a can that works? In 2009, the EPA banned the gas can with a vent opposite the spout. You now get a sloshing, burping, gasoline-erupting monster with a spout that breaks faster than a champagne glass at a wedding reception. It is like a giant dribble-glass prank played on all Americans.

Most of us don’t buy gas cans on a regular basis, so a lot of people today won’t know any better, but it is another example of things that don’t work as well as they used to because of government regulation.

Regulations today don’t affect just gas cans. In fact, the Competitive Enterprise Institute estimates that regulations cost Americans $1.9 trillion annually, with the biggest hitters being economic regulation at $3.99 billion, environmental at $3.94 billion and tax compliance, rounding out the top three at $3.16 billion. If U.S. regulatory costs were a country, it would be the world’s seventh-largest economy, just behind India and ahead of Italy.

A bellwether of regulation is how many pages are added to the Federal Register during a particular year.

The 2016 total showed 95,894 pages for the year, up 19.4 percent from the previous year. This was the highest level in history. If one were to look at pages per decade, it would indicate that the decade of the 2010s nearly doubled the number promulgated during the 1970s. These 95,000-plus pages are indicative of the total final rules passed by the administration. The total rules passed by all administrations up to 1993 was 4,369. In the ensuing 23 years, that total has grown to nearly 99,000.

It is not just the rules that are passed by an administration that add to the total cost of regulation in the U.S. According to the CEI, official rules do not include other bureaucratic activities that fall outside the purview of the Administrative Procedures Act, which specifies the formal process that must be followed to issue regulations. The CEI refers to these as “regulatory dark matter.” Like the dark matter of the universe, they are invisible to the population and hard to detect.

All this cannot be laid in the lap of the past administrations; in fact, Congress merits some of the blame for allowing overdelegation of its own authority for decades. This has seriously undermined checks and balances and the principle of separation of powers.

All of the above point out the importance of individuals commenting on rule-making by federal and state agencies.

Farm Bureau continues to keep members notified of these actions such as waters of the U.S., or WOTUS, which, for the record, was not yet made a law; labor rules; electronic log books; and so on. We gladly provide basic talking points for folks to use for comments.

Back to the gas can. The hardware store sells a water can that has a durable spout with the vent on the opposite side that pours perfectly. Of course, I would never use that for gasoline. John Youngberg is executive vice president of the Montana Farm Bureau Federation. Reprinted with permission from the California Farm Bureau Federation.