Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Red Tape Blues

Good story in the Economist about the cost of regulation in the US, something like $1.86 trillion a year. Most small businesses complain more about over-regulation than high taxes.  If Carbondale is serious about changing its image to make itself more "business friendly", a good place to start is to work through the revised code and prune regulations, determining which are useful for the well being of the community and which are not.

The problem of course is that you will always find someone to defend every regulation, as no regulation gets passed into law without someone seeing a need for it.

However, there is evidence the city can make changes. Witness the number of new sidewalk signs that have appeared on downtown streets after the regulations affecting them were rewrittten. It took several years to get the rules changes but it did finally happen.

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