Federal Regulatory Cost, 2013: $1.9 Trillion

Taxation, regulation, inflation, and war: these are the four horsemen of the federal apocalypse. Cut these, and the state gets smaller. Of these, regulation gets the least attention.
Regulation is the heart of the beast, for it operates in secret. It can be found in the pages of The Federal Register: about 80,000 pages, three columns, per year. But this only lists the regulations, not the financial burden.

This post was published at Tea Party Economist on October 1, 2014.