Over Regulated

It has been estimated that all the regulations on businesses cost 1.75 trillion per year or nearly $6000 per person. This is enough money that if it was freed up companies could hire every unemployeed person in America at a wage of over $60,000 each. This amount could also be used to buy health insurance for everyone who didn't have it. Of course given the way money flows it's likely that they would only hire a small portion of the unemployed but the point still stands that regulation costs are incredibly high.


This is not to say that some regulations aren't important because while the free market will regulate on its own to an extent cooperation's will try to get away with as much as they can. However, many regulations do little to protect consumers and others are arbitrary.
Further even some seemingly good regulations could be considered bad when weighed against their negative outcome. A regulation which protects a few people from getting salmonella but causes many more to be without a job and medical insurance can't be said to have a positive outcome. Because of this regulations need to be reexamined and weighed against the problems they cause or at times groups of regulations should all be scrapped and new regulations determined.


Regulations Need Innovations
Regulations have a goal, to insure that products are healthy for example, and anything with a goal can benefit from innovation. New regulations need to be developed which meet the need to insure healthy products without increasing costs.


For example recent regulations require toy companies to get their products tested to insure they are lead free are good in that they provide children with lead free toys but instead of expensive tests for every small toy company a toy company could opt to purchase their materials only from suppliers that are known be be lead free. After all it's not hard to find lead free plastic, paint, and wood in this country so local U.S. manufacturers. could easily provide receipts that they were purchasing from those who had already been lead free in order to prove that they were. 


In restaurants Bacteria is the concern; not sink size, equipment, etc. So innovations could be developed to audit restaurants kitchens and foods to insure that they don't have too much bad bacteria. Such testing could allow audits of food production facilities to occur more quickly, would allow businesses to open an run with less cost while meeting the actual goal of the regulations.


There are of course many possible innovations to reduce the cost of regulations while maintaining the safety of the public, so methods need to be set up to discover these methods through suggestion wiki's, rewards for programs that succeed in saving money, and when possible innovation teams.