photo by Gage Skidmore
College students who trekked to this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) got a civics lesson they were probably unaccustomed to receiving, unless they go to Hillsdale.
“Do you know that we make about twenty or thirty times the number of laws that we used to but Congress makes about the same number of laws?” Hillsdale president Larry Arnn said to the students at CPAC. “Laws are made and enforced by federal agencies.”
“Half of the economy passes through the hands of the government through taxes and regulation.”
CPAC was held at the Gaylord Hotel in National Harbor, Maryland, near the nation’s capital. Dr. Arnn urged visiting college students to take note of “the ugly (federal) buildings on the mall where they are usually doing something unconstitutional.” And expensive.
“This is a hard story to pitch to media outlets but the people who pay for it, their readers and viewers, might find it fascinating,” I noted in Media Malpractice: The ABCs of Media Bias, a special report for Accuracy in Media. “The last U.S. government report to take a comprehensive look at the cost of federal regulations came from the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) in 2010: The SBA put the number at $1.7 trillion.”
You can watch his speech below:
Photo by Gage Skidmore 
