Joe Biden has been a massive failure in changing actual laws through congressional action (which is good). But that does not mean he has not damaged the country with his leftist lunacy. Unfortunately, to enact his dangerous, left-wing agenda, he has sent the worst wave of new regulations through the country in U.S. history.
The Wall Street Journal noted that gridlock may be happening in Congress, but the Democrats’ anti-American agenda is still running rife through the country thanks to Joe Biden’s regulatory march to the extreme left.
Per the Journal:
President Biden is leading an unprecedented expansion of the administrative state. In two years his Administration has imposed 517 regulatory actions with some $318 billion in total costs. By the same point in his Administration, President Obama had imposed 740 comparable rules with a cost of $208 billion. Across four years President Trump imposed 1,340 rules at a cost of $64.7 billion.
These figures come from the American Action Forum, which says that in 2022 alone federal agencies finalized 264 regulations with economic impact, totting up $117.1 billion in net regulatory costs. Another 311 proposed rules are in the pipeline and would cost $191.2 billion when final. Twenty-three of those rules will cost $1 billion each.
Regulatory costs to the economy are now reckoned to be at least $2 trillion, or roughly 8% of U.S. gross domestic product in 2021, according to Wayne Crews at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. If you think of regulation as a tax, Mr. Crews notes, it would be larger than the federal income tax and come out to around $14,684 per family. If the cost of U.S. regulation were a country, it would rank a little behind France’s GDP.
Too many Americans think that voting a GOP majority will “fix” things. But with the regulatory state having grown on such a massive scale, Congress hardly even matters anymore.
Until we begin ending this power by eliminating tens of thousands of federal jobs and closing down their agencies, we won’t ever fix this destruction of freedom.
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