10,000 Commandments: Average U.S. household spends more on federal regulations than for health care, food or transportation

◼ 10,000 (very costly) Commandments - Mark Tapscott/Washington Examiner

Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute... latest edition of his annual compilation, "10,000 Commandments: An annual snapshot of the federal regulatory state."

Crews estimates the annual cost of compliance with the record number of new federal rules and regulations issued under President Obama at $1.863 trillion.

That works out to a $14,974 "hidden tax" every year for the average U.S. household. That's 23 percent of the $65,596 annual average household income in America.

You can't do that! Or that! Or that!

Just how well-chosen is Crews' title is seen in another data point produced for the 2014 edition of his study: Congress passed and Obama signed 72 new laws in 2013. The federal bureaucracy to date has issued 3,659 rules to implement those new laws.

The Federal Register in 2013 devoted 26,417 pages just to publishing the new rules. That's the most ever in a single year.

◼ Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State - Competitive Enterprise Institute

Ten Thousand Commandments is an annual report by CEI Vice President for Policy Wayne Crews on the growing compliance costs of federal regulations. The purpose of the report is to hold legislators and regulators accountable for the regulatory burdens they impose on American business owners, workers, and families.

About the report: The federal government primarily funds its programs in three ways. The first is to raise taxes to pay for new programs. The second is to borrow money to pay for them (with a promise to pay back that borrowed money, with interest, from taxes collected in the future).

The third way the government can accomplish its goals is to regulate. That is, rather than pay directly and book the expense of a new initiative, it can require that the private sector and lower-level governments pay. By regulating, the government can carry out desired programs but avoid using tax dollars to fund them. This process sometimes allows Congress to escape accountability and to blame agencies for costs. Since disclosure and accountability for regulation are limited, policymakers have little incentive to care about the extent of regulatory costs or where those costs stand in relation to ordinary government spending. Regulatory costs are unbudgeted and lack the formal presentation to the public and media to which ordinary federal spending is subject, and thus regulatory initiatives allow the government to direct private-sector resources to a significant degree without much public fuss. In that sense, regulation can be thought of as off-budget taxation.