75-01-A3
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Inflation
TranscriptIf you're charged with breaking the law, you're considered innocent until proven guilty. But if you're charged with breaking a bureaucrat's regulation, it's the other way around unfortunately. I'll be right back. Inflation is high prices. Anything that lowers prices legitimately without hurting someone helps reduce inflation. Right now, business in America is more regulated by government than it is in any other country in the world where free enterprise is still permitted. If we had fewer regulations, we could have lower prices. Small businessmen, those with fewer than 500 employees, spend an estimated 130 million man-hours a year doing government required paperwork. This adds about fifty billion dollars a year to the cost of doing business and that's added to the cost of the things you buy. Then government spends about fifteen to twenty billion finding places to store all that paper and you pick up the tab for that too, in your taxes. Government's grown so big in the last four decades that not even the Office of Management and Budget in Washington knows how many boards, agencies, bureaus and commissions there are. But all of them have the power to adopt regulations with the authority of law. As a matter of fact, in a way they have more power thsn if you're charged with breaking a law. You have your day in court and you're considered innocent and lessened until you're proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. But breaking a regulation is another matter. The agency enforcing that regulation is judge, jury and executioner, and you're guilty as charged unless you can prove your innocence. One small businessman in California ran afoul of one of those regulations, he was ordered to install separate men's and women's washrooms for his employees. He only has one employee and at home they sleep in the same bed and use the same bathroom, she's his wife. In Connecticut, a chemical researcher has five employees. He files 37 different reports for 12 federal agencies, 26 sets of data for nine state agencies, 25 for city departments and now he's just learned he has to make out an environmental impact statement, probably telling why he uses so much paper. A druggist in another state reports it takes more time to do the paperwork in connection with a prescription than it does to make up the prescription. Speaking of drugs and paperwork, a few years ago, a leading drug firm had to submit some 70 pages of data to the Federal Drug Administration to get a drug licensed. Recently, the same firm made application for a new drug and sent a truck loaded with 72,000 pages of data to support its application. If penicillin were discovered today, I doubt that it could get approval. The story is the same for every kind of business, we pay higher and higher prices because government continues to spend more than it takes in and because too much money is chasing too few goods and services. There could be more available for us to buy if government would lift some of the paper burden from the back of our industrial system. Just a three percent reduction would also save about 12 billion dollars a year in government costs and wouldn't that be a refreshing way to slow down inflation. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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