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Originally Posted by JiggyMac
I looked at
The report (Which says $1.9T, not $600B. I don't understand the title of the WSJ article but I also can't see the whole article...)
There's an obvious problem. The report begins by talking about cost/benefit analyses done by the OMB:
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The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) annually surveys regulatory costs and benefits. Its 2016 Draft Report to Congress on the Benefits and Costs of Federal Regulations and Agency Compliance with the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act pegs the annual costs of 129 selected “major” regulations from 2005 to 2015 at between $74 billion and $110 billion (in 2014 dollars). The estimated range for benefits in the new report spanned $269 billion to $872 billion (in 2014 dollars). According to OMB, rules subjected to both benefit and cost analyses during the fiscal year ending September 2015 show added annual costs of $5.5 to $6.9 billion (2014 dollars). (p. 7)
In other words, regulations not only have costs but benefits. And at least in some cases the benefits grossly outweight the costs (by at least 2:1 in the one case cited above).
The report complains that the cost/benefit analyses are not done on a sufficient number of regulations, which is fair enough. But what do they do? They go on to try to develop estimates of the cost without any estimate of the benefit. Which makes it highly misleading to say that regulation costs 600 billion (or 1.9 trillion?) dollars annually. What are the benefits? The conclusion of the report says:
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Certainly, some regulations’ benefits exceed costs, but net benefits or even actual costs are known for very few. Without more complete regulatory accounting, it is difficult to know whether society wins or loses as a result of rules.
Again, that's fair enough. Cost/benefit analyses are useful, and it could be argued that we should do more of them. What's not reasonable is to pretend like cost estimates that ignore benefit estimates are useful.
It's also not particularly reasonable to think that all benefits will have direct monetary value, or that the lack of direct monetary value means they have no value at all. Man shall not live on profits alone, one might say. How do you quantify the benefits of the Clean Air Act? Perhaps you can estimate the impact to health care costs, but I think anyone who would abandon the EPA if it turned out that it costs money to have clean air is not thinking very clearly.