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Show JtTlra ; .MlMepOrt by SenatorOrin Hatch Loosening theregulatory noose That applies to anything: ice cream, free time, basketball, and federal regulation. Especially federal regulation. American business now spends $100 billion annually, or 1.2 billion hours, complying with government regulations. Forty-one thousand separate federal and state regulations are affixed to the hamburger you may have eaten for lunch. With apologies to Calvin Coolidge, the business of America is no longer business, it's compliance. It's hard to argue with the intent, of most individual regulations, which .'. o'.:ld protect us from hazards ranging fpim industrial accidents to flammable pajamas. The problem is, business can't deal with individual regulations; it has to consider new rules in the context of all the others it's complying with. For example, a new regulation requiring increased gas mileage by a .."-tain year looks fine by itself, but v ii'-n c onsidered alongside a rule i.'uiripg increased auto weight for heiel.tened safety, it's obviously ab-urd. ab-urd. Business sees that absurdity; government, too often dealing with vineSe proposals, cannot. Ad-led to this are the contrasting ... orlds of the regulators and the ; 02. :latees. Government agencies, t,ri uted from the cold winds of !;!, can deal in an imaginative I, lil of theories and ideals, while !. :,( -.s people, living in the real .' 'it Id. may he too caught up in earning : Iv.irg or making a sale to be overly cm -erncd about the number of shrubs io t: -t parking lot or the length of the handrails on their staircases. These problems, which have been pointed out to me as I've chaired the Senate's Government Regulation and Paperwork Subcommittee, emphasize the difficulty of regulating business from a non-business perspective. "Government people, unless they have experience in the field, often don't know anything about the way things really are," said Bill Gillespie, owner of Cedar City's Sunshine Health Foods. "Some of them read a book and then think they're professionals, but it doesn't work that way." Mr. Gillespie, and a number of other Utah small business owners, were pleased to hear of a new bill, introduced by Nevada's Paul Laxalt, that could ease his complaint. Sen. Laxalt's bill calls for regulatory agencies to acquire a business perspective, and to look at not only the intended benefits of a new rule but also the potential costs and adverse effects. It requires the periodic review' of existing regulation to ensure that no rules outlive their usefulness, and it seeks to give those affected by regulations some say in writing them. Those actions "would give the government a feel for what the people and business interests want, and what affects them," said Vernon Erb, owner of E&E Sports Center in Moab. Without it, he said, government would continue to operate as it does not - "over our heads" - a condition as unpalatable to Mr. Erb as it is to President Reagan. "We must come to grips with inefficient inef-ficient and burdensome regulations," the President has said. "Eliminate those we can and reform those we must keep." |