posted September 16, 2011 07:03 AM            

But wait, that's the 2008 number and it represented almost 12% of the entire Gross Domestic Product.

Since O'Bomber began infesting the White House he's piled on yet another blizzard of federal business regulations.

Now, here's the good news.

Businesses don't pay the costs of those regulations fashioned by the long bony nosed busybody bureaucrats who typically have no private sector business experience.

YOU pay the costs of all this regulation in the price of every product and service you buy....just as YOU pay every penny of taxes levied against businesses.

Time for some people to "wise up"!

The ‘hidden tax’: Report estimates regulation costs economy $1.75 trillion
04/19/2011
Chris Moody

The nation remains stuck on the debate over how Washington taxes and spends, but lost in the shuffle are the trillions of dollars Americans spend every year just to comply with federal regulations.

Wayne Crews, vice president for policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, combed through the 81,405 pages of the Federal Registry — which contains the nation’s regulations on businesses, and state and local governments — and cites a report showing that regulation cost the economy a whopping $1.75 trillion in 2008.

That’s a lot of dough for an economy struggling to get back on its feet after one of the worst recessions in recent memory. Problem is — and politicians know it — hardly anyone pays much attention. (You mean you weren’t hooked at “federal regulatory code” either?)

Here’s the theory: Americans are reminded of their taxes with each paycheck, they watch debates over government spending on the nightly news and hear members of Congress scream about “waste, fraud and abuse” on the House and Senate floors. But how many Tea Party rallies focus on rules concerning the “importation of manufactured wood articles” that raise the price for companies and consumers? The entire language of regulation — which Crews calls the “hidden tax” — just isn’t sexy enough to get anyone riled up, making it easier to stuff the federal code with more rules.

Agencies write and pass new rules largely out of sight, so even some of the heaviest news junkies out there tend to overlook the economic impact, Crews argues.

“Because such regulatory costs are not budgeted and lack the formal public disclosure of federal spending, they may generate comparatively little public outcry,” Crews writes in his report, entitled 10,000 Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State.

For elected officials looking for a way to steer a company in a particular direction, regulation could quickly become the preferred method over calling for a new tax they’d be forced to defend and fight for in the public square.

“If regulatory costs remain largely hidden from public view, regulating will become increasingly attractive compared with increasingly unpopular taxing and spending,” Crews writes. “Rather than pay directly and book expenses for new initiatives, the federal government can require the private sector — as well as state and local governments — to pay for federal initiatives through compliance costs.”

Crews admits that measuring the exact cost of regulation is impossible, but there is little doubt that with every new item added to the federal code, the nation’s business owners, and the people who buy the products they make, pay just that much more.

The report also finds:

• In 2010, federal agencies issued 3,573 final rules.

• While agencies issued 3,573 final rules, Congress passed and the president signed into law a comparatively “few” 217 bills. Considerable lawmaking power is delegated to unelected bureaucrats at agencies, an abuse addressed recently in proposals such as the REINS Act.

• Proposed rules in the Federal Register have surged from 2,044 in 2009 to 2,439 in 2010, a jump of 19.3 percent.

• Of the 4,225 rules now in the regulatory pipeline, 224 are “economically significant” meaning they wield at least $100 million in economic impact—this is an increase of 22 percent over 2009’s 184 rules.

• Given 2010’s government spending (outlays) of $3.456 trillion, the regulatory “hidden tax” of $1.75 trillion stands at an unprecedented 50.7 percent of the level of federal spending itself.

• Regulatory costs exceed all 2008 corporate pretax profits of $1.463 trillion.

• Regulatory costs dwarf corporate income taxes of $157 billion.

• Regulatory costs tower over the estimated 2010 individual income taxes of $936 billion by 87 percent—nearly double the level.

• Regulatory costs of $1.75 trillion absorb 11.9 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), estimated at $14.649 trillion in 2010.

posted November 25, 2011 08:41 AM            

'Company Policy: We are not hiring until Obama is gone'
6:53 PM, Nov 23, 2011

WACO, Ga. -- A west Georgia business owner is stirring up controversy with signs he posted on his company's trucks, for all to see as the trucks roll up and down roads, highways and interstates:

"New Company Policy: We are not hiring until Obama is gone."

"Can't afford it," explained the employer, Bill Looman, Tuesday evening. "I've got people that I want to hire now, but I just can't afford it. And I don't foresee that I'll be able to afford it unless some things change in D.C."

Looman's company is U.S. Cranes, LLC. He said he put up the signs, and first posted pictures of the signs on his personal Facebook page, six months ago, and he said he received mostly positive reaction from people, "about 20-to-one positive."

But for some reason, one of the photos went viral on the Internet on Monday.

And the reaction has been so intense, pro and con, he's had to have his phones disconnected because of the non-stop calls, and he's had to temporarily shut down his company's website because of all the traffic crashing the system.

Looman made it clear, talking with 11Alive's Jon Shirek, that he is not refusing to hire to make some political point; it's that he doesn't believe he can hire anyone, because of the economy. And he blames the Obama administration.

"The way the economy's running, and the way my business has been hampered by the economy, and the policies of the people in power, I felt that it was necessary to voice my opinion, and predict that I wouldn't be able to do any hiring," he said.

Looman did receive some unexpected attention not long after he put up his signs and Facebook photos. He said someone, and he thinks he knows who it was, reported him to the FBI as a threat to national security. He said the accusation filtered its way through the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and finally the Secret Service. Agents interviewed him.

"The Secret Service left here, they were in a good mood and laughing," Looman said. "I got the feeling they thought it was kind of ridiculous, and a waste of their time."

So Bill Looman is keeping the signs up, and the photos up -- stirring up a lot of debate.

"I just spent 10 years in the Marine Corps protecting the rights of people... the First Amendment, and the Second Amendment and the [rest of the] Bill of Rights," he said. "Lord knows they're calling me at 2 in the morning, all night long, and voicing their opinion. And I respect their right to do that. I'm getting a reaction, a lot of it's negative, now. But a lot of people are waking up."
http://www.11alive.com/news/article/214228/3/Company-Policy-We-are-not-hiring-until-Obama-is-gone

posted December 04, 2011 12:24 PM            

Everyone is paying the $1.75 TRILLION tab...except for the free loaders who subsist on the taxpayer's dime.

Choking on Obamacare
George F. Will
December 2

LOS ANGELES

In 1941, Carl Karcher was a 24-year-old truck driver for a bakery. Impressed by the large numbers of buns he was delivering, he scrounged up $326 to buy a hot dog cart across from a Goodyear plant. And the war came.

So did millions of defense industry workers and their cars. And, soon, Southern California’s contribution to American cuisine — fast food. Including, eventually, hundreds of Carl’s Jr. restaurants. Karcher died in 2008, but his legacy, CKE Restaurants, survives. It would thrive, says CEO Andy Puzder, but for government’s comprehensive campaign against job creation.

CKE, with more than 3,200 restaurants (Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s), has created 70,000 jobs, 21,000 directly and 49,000 with franchisees. The growth of those numbers will be inhibited by — among many government measures — Obama­care.

When CKE’s health-care advisers, citing Obamacare’s complexities, opacities and uncertainties, said that it would add between $7.3 million and $35.1 million to the company’s $12 million health-care costs in 2010, Puzder said: I need a number I can plan with. They guessed $18 million — twice what CKE spent last year building new restaurants. Obamacare must mean fewer restaurants.

And therefore fewer jobs. Each restaurant creates, on average, 25 jobs — and as much as 3.5 times that number of jobs in the community. (CKE spends about $1 billion a year on food and paper products, $175 million on advertising, $33 million on maintenance, etc.)

Puzder laughs about the liberal theory that businesses are not investing because they want to “punish Obama.” Rising health-care costs are, he says, just one uncertainty inhibiting expansion. Others are government policies raising fuel costs, which infect everything from air conditioning to the cost (including deliveries) of supplies, and the threat that the National Labor Relations Board will use regulations to impose something like “card check” in place of secret-ballot unionization elections.

CKE has about 720 California restaurants, in which 84 percent of the managers are minorities and 67 percent are women. CKE has, however, all but stopped building restaurants in this state because approvals and permits for establishing them can take up to two years, compared to as little as six weeks in Texas, and the cost to build one is $100,000 more than in Texas, where CKE is planning to open 300 new restaurants this decade.

CKE restaurants have 95 percent employee turnover in a year — not bad in this industry — and the health-care benefits under CKE’s current “mini-med” plans are capped in a way that makes them illegal under Obamacare. So CKE will have to convert many full-time employees to part-timers to limit the growth of its burdens under Obamacare.

In an economic climate of increasing uncertainties, Puzder says, one certainty is that many businesses now marginally profitable will disappear when Obamacare causes that margin to disappear. A second certainty is that “employers everywhere will be looking to reduce labor content in their business models as Obamacare makes employees unambiguously more expensive.”

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, by 2008 the cost of federal regulations had reached $1.75 trillion. That was 14 percent of national income unavailable for job-creating investments. And that was more than 11,000 regulations ago.

Seventy years ago, the local health department complained that Karcher’s hot dog cart had no restroom facilities. He got help from a nearby gas station. A state agency made him pay $15 for workers’ compensation insurance. Another agency said that he owed more than the $326 cost of the cart in back sales taxes. For $100, a lawyer successfully argued that Karcher did not because his customers ate their hot dogs off the premises.

Time was, American businesses could surmount such regulatory officiousness. But government’s metabolic urge to boss people around has grown exponentially and today CKE’s California restaurants are governed by 57 categories of regulations. One compels employees and even managers to take breaks during the busiest hours, lest one of California’s 200,000 lawyers comes trolling for business at the expense of business.