Look At This Picture and Ponder What It Means

Mark Perry has a simply shocking graph. Why the disparity? Because this bill - and the ObamaCare bill that came before it - are not big ideas, not the macro-focused, structural reforms that can be expressed relatively succintly, but a vast warren of proscribed picayune details and special favors. In a (hyphenated) word, "micro-management". The US economy cannot perform as it has performed over the last 50 years with close to 40% of it micro-managed to the extent represented by these bills. That is why I have dubbed the one-two punch of these bills the equivalent of the National Recovery Act of 1933, they seek to dictate nearly every last detail of the economy. Hopefully this will all end in a reversal of direction, but the road to get there is very ugly indeed. Unless by some miracle of regulatory restraint these bills don't reach their potential for micro-management of economy, we are looking at anemic growth or additional recession.