Title: The Administrative State Is Under Assault And That's A Good Thing
Headings: The Administrative State Is Under Assault And That's A Good Thing
The Administrative State Is Under Assault And That's A Good Thing
Content: It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.” By Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, the Federal Register, a compendium of federal rules, was created and the administrative state was off to the races. Since 1960, the federal rule book proscribing American activities large and small has grown from 22,000 pages to 185,000 pages —ObamaCare regulations alone consume about 10,000 pages of that total. As the United States was created, there were some half-dozen federal laws such as treason and counterfeiting that could send you to prison. Now, violate any one of the estimated 300,000 rules—even if you’re completely unaware of the rule—and you may be sent to the federal slammer in what is referred to as “ overcriminalization .” Over the past 57 years, the ranks of the regulatory bureaucracy, many of them lawyers and other highly trained workers, swelled from 57,000 to more than 185,000. Every dollar spent at the direction of the federal government is a dollar not spent by Americans exercising their own priorities. Federal spending dictated 17.2 percent of the economy in 1960. In the last full year of the Obama administration, it grew to command 20.9 percent of the economy. The federal tax code runs to 2,600 pages requiring 70,000 pages to explain.