The Cost

There are two items of expense in the business of running a community by law. One is the cost of making laws. The other is the cost of enforcing them. Tine Budget, a paper published by the National Budget Committee (which advocates increased economy in public business), published statistics to show that the average cost of passing laws in state legislatures is between $717 and $890 per statute. On top of this is the cost of enforcing laws once they are made.

The argument of the Budget Committee has been criticized editorially because the " overhead " of running a legislature is more or less fixed. If we have " too much government" it does not increase the cost of legislation, because the expenses of a legislature would be approximately the same whether it passed at a session 100 laws or 5,000.