Thursday, April 29, 2010

COTD: Burdens

clipped from esr.ibiblio.org
I have no idea what it costs in Europe to hire, but I do have an idea why companies are not hiring in the U.S. My family’s company is agriculture based and, until recently, had a lucrative side-business of leasing drivers and large (5 axles and up) trucks to construction companies that needed extra trucks. Tax burdens and obvious costs have been fairly steady over the past ten years; however, other regulatory burdens have greatly increased costs in non-obvious ways. For example, a change in regulations on required protective equipment on the back of semi-trailers resulted in two cost increases. The first was an increase in the raw cost of trailers by about 5%. The second cost was an entirely hidden result. Poorly trained Department of Transportation (DOT) officers started issuing tickets to trucks with the new trailers for failing to meet the now outdated standards.
The problem is not the obvious burdens of taxes, its the non-obvious burdens of regulations and requirements