Federal regulations cost America 2 trillion dollars in 2012. For comparison our GDP for 2012 is around 16 trillion. http://www.nam.org/Data-and-Reports/Cost-of-Federal-Regulations/Federal-Regulation-Executive-Summary.pdf
Could you find a link for state and local regulation costs so we can see what it is for comparisons?
Regarding codes, NYC recently re-wrote their building codes to streamline them and get rid of many archaic rules that cost a lot but did little to improve safety or construction. Private as well as government saved a lot of money. (Government has to follow the same codes when building as private and the city had to cut costs.) They still have stupid and costly rules that serve no purpose. I once installed a small 1/4 horsepower exhaust fan in a window that we bought for around $150. Code requires that the manufacturer's name and model number be on the engineer's plans that were already filed with the Dept of Building's. So we had to re-hire the engineer at around $700 to update his plans that showed the fan at 1/4 hp but with out the model info. You don't know that at the time of design. Putting that additional info on the plans serves no real purpose. So $750 was spent for no purpose. That doesn't even include the costs for soft labor of arranging an inspection to show the plans match the installation fan nameplate. We're taking about a tiny fan like you would install in your window. It's these kind of regulations that that should be expunge fro local and federal rules.
I work a lot with architects and they always complain about codes and regulations being too damn burdensome. I could call every single client of mine today and ask if they had a project fall through because of the regulations in the past year, and every single one would say yes go off on a tangent about it.
Some of them make sense, but many do not.
A great example was a client of mine designed a multi-family residential project. Any multi-family with 4 or more units must be ADA compliant. One regulation in the ADA is that the top of all water heaters can be no more then 48 inches off the ground. They drew the plans based on the current specs of the product, however it takes time to get a project going. The following year, when they ordered the heaters, the manufacture increased the height of the heaters by 1/2 inch. They got hit with an ADA non-compliance over a half inch and had to fix it. Fixing it not only meant fixing it on site, but in the plans too; you know how many pages a building plan is for a new construction project? At least a hundred, with separate plans for all the subs. All of those had to be adjusted.
Another client of mine had a really nice office building renovation project with a budget of about $450K. The building was an old two story building with no elevator but built before the ADA. ADA regs now state that all public and work buildings need an elevator. The cost of installing an elevator in this building was $150K, then you through in the yearly maintenance and inspection fees and not to mention the amount of usable space lost. The project died before anything was even drawn.
I remember a few years ago PA was going to make it law that all new
single family residential projects (so any house) needed to have a sprinkler system. Eventually PA realized how stupid this was and how much it would slow down single family construction they decided not to pass the bill, but only after probably half of the architects licensed in the state called Harrisburg.
I could go on and on with how regulations killed jobs, and if you ever sit down with an architect, just ask them. I guarantee the conversation won't be short.
So to say regulations don't kill projects is ludicrous.
