A raft of regulations enacted by the Biden administration is pinching Americans’ wallets to the tune of nearly $10,000 per household as of the end of last year, according to a budget watchdog group.
Should Biden’s regulatory trajectory keep pace with that of his former boss, Barack Obama, the cost will skyrocket to roughly $60,000 per household by the end of Biden’s possible second term in office, the Committee to Unleash Prosperity estimated in a recent report that measured “current and expected future costs.”
“This is an across-the-board human capital crisis like we haven’t seen for decades,” Casey Mulligan, the University of Chicago professor who authored the report, told “Fox & Friends” Friday.
Many of the new rules include policies on the environment, energy, healthcare, telecommunications, and transportation.
The most notable cost highlighted by the report was Biden’s executive action to grant mass forgiveness of student loans, which the Congressional Budget Office estimated would cost $316 billion, but which other sources said could go as high as $430 billion.
The Supreme Court nixed the giveaway on June 30, but Biden has already sought to revive the initiative. The White House announced Friday it will forgive “financially vulnerable” borrowers any missed payments for the first 12 months after collection resumes Oct. 1.
In addition, the Biden administration said it had finalized rules reducing the amount of discretionary income that borrowers have to pay each month from 10% to 5% for undergraduate loans and forgiving outstanding debts of $12,000 or fewer after 10 years of payments instead of 20 years.
The Committee to Unleash Prosperity report also zinged Biden for implementing a COVID vaccine-or-test rule for large businesses, which was also smacked down by the high court; price controls for prescription drugs outlined in the Inflation Reduction Act; and higher standards for automobile emissions.
“While the automobile fuel economy and emissions standards contribute the greatest single cost, they still account for only a third of the total regulatory costs. Collectively, health, labor, telecommunications, and consumer finance regulations impose costs that exceed those of automobile regulations,” the report said.
The report found that Biden had implemented fewer new regulations in his first two years in office than either of his two immediate predecessors.
However, Biden topped both Trump and Obama in terms of the financial impact of those rules.
Costs for the president’s red tape in 2021 and 2022 clocked in at around $173.4 billion, according to government agencies. However, the watchdog pegged the costs at $616.7 billion, with Mulligan citing the feds’ “systematic and proven propensity to understate costs.”
Trump’s regulatory impact was measured at a cost of $8.6 billion by the government agencies, while the watchdog estimated savings of $323.9 billion. Obama’s rules added a cost of $147.9 billion, per the agencies’ estimations and $534.8 billion, per the watchdog.
In sharp contrast to Biden, Trump’s deregulatory push led to roughly $11,000 in savings per household and eight years of Trump would’ve delivered nearly $21,000 in savings, the report estimated.
“President Trump did something, first thing that had ever happened in American history: he had a budget for the regulators,” Mulligan told Fox.
“We saw amazing results from that. They were cutting out old regulations, cutting out unneeded regulations, and they were putting in some new ones that they felt were needed.”
Biden began aggressively promoting so-called “Bidenomics” last week as he seeks to counter fierce GOP criticism and dismal public opinion on the economy.
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
