Got 169 days? Or are you over-regulated and over-taxed to pay for it all

If you've not seen this column, you need to put it on your regular reading list. Political Calculations is a Townhall.com feature and it looks at numbers (go figure). The latest, The Regulation of the American People, is pretty scary when you think about the implications of it.

As their chart shows, regulation has skyrocketed since the 1970s which they tie to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency:

Of course, Obamacare regulations aren't written yet and who knows how many pages that will add. They provide this quote:

The Health and Human Services Department "was given a billion dollars implementation money," Republican Rep. Denny Rehberg of Montana said. "That money is gone already on additional bureaucrats and IT programs, computerization for the implementation."

...

The IRS, Health and Human Services and many other agencies will now write thousands of pages of regulations -- an effort well under way:

"There's already 13,000 pages of regulations, and they're not even done yet," Rehberg said.

Remember: for every single regulation there is a cost - not just to government to create, implement and the monitor the regulation and compliance, but also to every entity that is required, under penalty of law, to implement and follow the mandates.

We, the taxpayer, end up paying twice as a result: to the government through taxes and to the regulated entity through higher prices.

These regulations don't expire, the laws don't have sunset clauses (which ends them if they are not renewed/voted on again by Congress) and they're almost impossible to understand. Consider that most adults read at a rate of about 200-250 words per minute and an accepted standard is 250 words per page.

Last year, there were 81,000 pages of regulations added to the Federal Register - note: added, not a total number of pages. For the sake of argument, let's say you could read the legislation at a rate of 250 wpm, which is generous because regulations are not like reading text in a book. Reading a page a minute, it would take you 1,350 hours to read what they published in 2011. If you spent eight hours a day reading, it would take you nearly 169 days.

Now that's just the federal register. There are state and local regulations and, since this is just the new ones, there are hundreds of thousands of pages already existing.

Since 2000, estimating from the chart, it appears that Congress added roughly 894,000 pages of regulations. Since I'm sure you didn't read them when they first came out, if you started now and read for eight hours a day (your eyes will need the rest), you'd finished on Sept. 4, 2017. If you decided to take weekends off, it would take you until Sept. 20, 2019!

Political Calculations says the estimate for this year is 76,300 - but will probably be more thanks to Obamacare, and as their quote says, one department has already spent over a billion dollars in the effort.

There is no way any American can know what they are required to do or what violation they might be committing by a simple act, like collecting and using rain water, that they would never believe was regulated.

Our government is out of control; our politicians brag about the new laws they create and pass; and none of the laws ever seems to go away, regardless of the need for them to do so.

And we are to blame for allowing it.