Cost of Federal government regulations totaling about $1.8 trillion, more than 10% of GDP

The Small Business Administration study by Nicole Crain and Mark Crain estimates that "the annual total cost of all federal regulations in 2008 was $1.752 trillion." Hardly the $88.6 billion that the OMB claims exists in 2010 dollars.  Yet, CEI adds up the estimates form different government sources and comes to a number very close to the Crain & Crain number.

Current federal regulations plus those coming under Obamacare will cost American taxpayers and businesses $1.8 trillion annually, more than twenty times the $88 billion the administration estimates, according to a new roundup provided to Secrets from the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute. 

And it could grow, warned the author of the report, Clyde Wayne Crews, a CEI vice president.Complying with Health and Human Services Department requirements alone, he revealed, costs $184 billion a year, yet regulators are still drafting the rules for the 2,400-page Obamacare law that kicks into gear in 2014.Crews has made a working project of his "Tip of the Costberg"report which he regularly updates. In it, he compares the cost of regulations estimated by federal agencies to a much broader list of estimates from multiple federal and independent sources. And even then, he said, it doesn't include hard-to-calculate costs associated with antitrust intervention, regulation of electricity networks, or the cost of constrained access to natural resources." 

While OMB officially reports amounts of only up to $88.6 billion in 2010 dollars," said Crews, "the non-tax cost of government intervention in the economy, without performing a sweeping survey, appears to total up to $1.806 trillion annually."But, he added, "according to back of the envelope surveys and roundups, with gaps big enough to fit the beltway through, that up to $1.806 trillion annually and in many categories perhaps even considerably more, is a defensible assessment of the annual impact on the economy." . . .