Our two political parties blather on about “fixing” the economy. They talk about helping the middle class. Both are talking about larger government to do so. Show me some data that says growing the government leads to a sustained economic growth.
Our $18 trillion economy has a great deal of regulation. The WSJ Journal estimates the cost as $1-2 trillion, AMAC at $1.9 trillion. That money goes to whom? Government! Inspectors, licensing personnel, tax recorders, inspectors, lawyers ( a bunch of them to create the rules and then a bunch to sue businesses when the inspectors find us out of compliance). You get the point.
Some regulation is important, for sure. We shouldn’t allow a bad actor to dump cyanide into the water table. We shouldn’t allow a pedophile to work at a day care center.
So the question is, what is the economic level of regulation that is needed so that opening a business is within reach of the average person? This is where we have gone astray.
Only Congress should be able to lay economic cost on businesses. Yet for every law passed, 30 regulations are put in place by the fourth branch, the bureaucracy! The Competitive Enterprise Institute calls this an “Unconstitutional Index.”
Some believe that growing the government is good, great jobs, great benefits, hard to get fired, lots of holidays, life is good. But as Margaret Thatcher said, paraphrasing, “The problem with larger government is eventually you run out of other peoples’ money.”
Even worse, the U.S. used to be the best place on the earth where hard work, desire and passion can get you into or above the middle class without permission from the ruling class. We are sliding down the scale of countries where doing business is the easiest, and other measure like opening a business. http://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings.
Want to raise wages in the US? Make it easier to open a business and more will be hired. This is dirt simple! Think of it, if we could put economic sense to regulations and eliminate half of them, a $1,000,000,000,000 program to fund growth, with a single dollar of taxpayer money. Yes, there will some people no longer employed by the government and some of that money should be spent to help them find new jobs; like the money we spent to help coal miners find new jobs. OOOPS, never mind, we didn’t do that.
WSJ July 27, 2016, “Braids of Liberty”. In Iowa if you wanted to braid hair of others you had to spend $22,000 and go to school for 2100 hours to be a cosmetologist. The Institute for Justice, http://www.ij.org/, helped a woman successfully challenge this ridiculous licensing requirement. A small example of a huge issue in our country, protecting established concerns from competition, limiting personal and economic freedom for all. Think of Uber!