Thirty-Thousand.org

According to the just-released 2010 edition of "Ten Thousand Commandments", an annual study published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, businesses and individuals incurred $1.187 trillion in expenses last year simply in order to comply with federal rules. Factor in the $54.3 billion that the federal government spends on administration and enforcement, and the full cost of the regulatory state comes to $1.24 trillion.

The Code of Federal Regulations is now over 157,000 pages long. Last year alone, 3,503 new rules went into effect -- that's nearly 10 new regulations every day, seven days a week.

Do you happen to know where I could get the total number of pages in the CFR each year? I've always wanted to graph out the increases in the number of pages each year.

Paul wrote:Do you happen to know where I could get the total number of pages in the CFR each year? I've always wanted to graph out the increases in the number of pages each year.

I just read this quote from George Washington:

The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position.

Paul, that would be a great graph! In fact, that's such a good idea, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody already did it.

However, I don't think the number of pages would be the right measure (pages and font sizes can change over time). It should be a graph of the number of regulations and/or the number of words. I don't know where you could find that data. Maybe the folks at the CEI have already done that.