Welcome to “What You Should Be Reading,” a monthly series in which the Taxpayers Protection Alliance paddles its way through Washington, D.C.’s sweltering heat and humidity to offer up impressive public-policy research that deserves your attention (the humidity is such that we suspect we’d handle it better if we had gills).

July’s edition includes a report on the state of the administrative state, a rebuttal of protectionists’ national-security arguments, and empirical evidence demonstrating that politicians’ efforts to secure subsidies also secure votes.

So, without further ado…

Competitive Enterprise Institute: “Ten Thousand Commandments: 2024 Edition”

Each year’s Ten Thousand Commandments report, written by the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Clyde Wayne Crews, is invaluable. The sheer size and bloat of federal regulations is stunning. The report’s findings sit squarely in the category of “must be seen to be believed.” Consider the following from this year’s edition:

• “This 2024 edition sets a new high-water mark of $2.1 trillion. All previous estimates had the annual total cost of federal regulations below $2 trillion.”
• “US households pay on average $15,788 annually in a hidden regulatory tax, which consumes 17 percent of income and 22 percent of household expenses.”
• “If it were a country, US regulation would be the world’s 10th-largest economy, ranking behind Canada and ahead of Italy.”
• “The 10.34 billion hours Washington says it took to complete federal paperwork in 2022, according to the Information Collection Budget, translate to the equivalent of 14,883 human lifetimes.”
• “During calendar year 2023, agencies issued 3,018 rules, whereas Congress enacted 68 laws. Thus, agencies issued 44 rules for every law enacted by Congress.”
• “Since the Federal Register first began itemizing final rules in 1976, 217,565 have been issued. Since 1993, when the first edition of Ten Thousand Commandments appeared, agencies have issued 120,475 final rules.”

Crews identifies one core appeal of regulation – it seems to cost less. “The hidden tax of regulation has proved appealing to lawmakers who feel the pressure of a national debt topping $34 trillion,” he writes (the national debt breached $35 trillion on July 29; Hurray, everybody!). “Off-budget regulations requiring private business outlays and adjustments rather than government spending have grown common despite congressional attempts to limit them.” These charges may not appear on the federal ledger, but American taxpayers – in their capacities as businesspeople and consumers – nonetheless pay them – in higher prices, compliance burdens, stagnated growth, missing jobs, and other opportunity costs.

President Joe Biden’s regulatory approach has several distinguishing traits. First, although the Biden administration has proliferated fewer rules than some administrations previous, it has disproportionately crafted sweeping, costly, and burdensome rules, destructive both to free markets and the free citizens who work within them. This administration has, moreover, weakened crucial accountability measures, such as cost–benefit analyses.

Perhaps worst of all, Biden has directed his agencies – all his agencies – to engage in progressive ideological mission creep and to pursue goals well outside their respective bailiwicks. “The whole-of-government philosophy advocates using every possible lever of government to advance certain policy objectives,” Crews writes. “In practice, that means that agencies, instead of being guided solely by their core missions, must also pursue goals such as equity and fighting climate change.”

Read the full piece here.

American Institute for Economic Research: “A Free, Prosperous and Secure America”

Many of the arguments hurled most often against free trade lean heavily on national security. The reasoning goes thus: Libertarians and “market fundamentalists” simply cannot grasp the national-security imperatives that require compromises with respect to central planning and free trade. (These are the same libertarians and “market fundamentalists” who, despite having “run Washington” for years, have apparently greenlit a profoundly fettered capitalist system.)

These arguments stem from confused foreign policy and shoddy economics, a new paper from the American Institute for Economic Research’s Samuel Gregg argues. Market-friendly economists dating back to Adam Smith have acknowledged national-security interests’ relevance to trade policy. But Gregg writes that many recently popular nationalist trade policies suffer from a double malady: They tilt at non-problems, and their solutions would weaken national security, not bolster it. Instead, they tend towards sluggish growth and geopolitical strife, not prosperity and peace.

“Grasping how economic nationalism weakens America’s national security requires recognizing one of economic nationalism’s original foundations: the insistence that commerce across borders resembles a zero-sum game,” Gregg writes. “This was an underlying assumption of mercantilist doctrines that dominated Western states from the late fifteenth century until the late eighteenth century.”

It is a fact that robust national security requires a robust, growing, and innovative economy. “Nonetheless, acknowledging national security’s reliance on maintaining sound economic conditions does not render a state’s economic policies the direct or even indirect responsibility of national security officials,” Gregg writes. “Nor does it mean that the US (or any other) government should assume close direction of the economy. Government-planned economies are far less proficient than market economies at generating economic growth.”

Moreover, contrary to popular anxiety about national “self-sufficiency,” domestic supply chains have proven no more robust and resilient than globalized ones (see: baby formula). Conversely, globalized markets offer options to momentarily destabilized industries, including during military conflict. “Securing more foreign supplies of military goods is one way to maintain or increase a state’s capacity for increased military production in times of crisis,” Gregg argues. He adds that “We should not assume that domestic production alone is sufficient to meet needs or will prove immune to domestic disturbances such as strikes.”

Protectionism and sundry other industrial policies sap the economic growth upon which America’s defense readiness rests. Those advocating it simply do not have economics on their side. For all their well-intentioned and patriotic concern, most of their preferred policies will, in practice, make American poorer – all while returning no national-security benefit.

Read the full piece here.

American Enterprise Institute: “Aid for Incumbents: The Electoral Consequences of COVID-19 Relief”

Federal spending buys many things that purportedly benefit the American people. Roads, bridges, domestic manufacturing plants, electric vehicles, telecommunications networks, healthcare, food stamps, the services of celebrity chefs – the list continues.

Federal spending also buys votes, as a recent working paper from the American Enterprise Institute finds. Examining the electoral impacts of Covid-19-era subsidies, authors Jeffrey Clemens, Julia Payson, and Stan Veuger observe that “States with more representation per capita not only secured more revenues” and “the politicians serving those states appeared to benefit electorally as a result of this windfall.”

Federal per-capita aid increases by roughly $1,000 for each additional representative or senator per million residents, the authors estimate. In turn, incumbents net an estimated three percentage points at the polls for each additional $1,000 per capita in federal spending secured.

“The resulting counterfactuals reveal that pandemic fiscal assistance did not have a substantial partisan bias with respect to the incumbents it may have helped across the finish line,” the authors write. “That said, 4 of the 5 Republican-incumbent races for which we predict different outcomes involved senators, while 6 of the 7 Democratic-incumbent races for which we predict different outcomes involved governors.”

Of course, politicians generally believe the subsidies they retrieve from Washington will benefit their constituents back home. But those constituents, when presented with some flashy new federally funded program, should remember that their representatives also receive something from the spending. Securing outlays of taxpayer dollars is never fully an altruistic act.

Read the full piece here.

Note: TPA highlights research projects that contribute meaningfully to important public-policy discussions. TPA does not necessarily endorse the policy recommendations featured authors make.