House Majority Leader John Boehner’s proposal for a one year moratorium on new regulations affecting business has the support of a plurality of voters, according to a new Rasmussen poll. The margin is slim: 38 percent approve of the idea, 34 percent disapprove and 28 percent don’t know. Many more people approve of the idea for regulations affecting small business than those affecting big business. What this suggests is that people know that regulation can make running a business unprofitable, but think that big business can absorb the cost. What they may not appreciate is that big business often lobbies for regulation for this very reason – it erects entry barriers against smaller maverick insurgents in their industry – and then pass on the cost of regulation to the rest of us.
The fact is that regulation now costs the US economy over $1 trillion a year, according to my colleague Wayne Crews. Every year, Wayne puts together a snapshot of the regulatory state called Ten Thousand Commandments. This year he found that regulation eats up 8.3 percent of the US economy and its cost is equal to 63 percent of corporate pretax profits. The burden of regulation on business dwarfs the burden of the corporate income tax.
