Those are covered in the Regulatory Impact Analysis conducted by the agencies, as applicable, for each major regulation. Give me your own study with what YOU think the total regulatory cost is. "I don't know" is not good enough.
What part of the gross, direct economic cost of the regulation is not the sum total of it's affects (good or bad) does not compute with you? Like I said, the authors are making NO claim that they are providing a full analysis of regulations and their total indirect and external costs and benefits.
I have no quarrel with the numbers they have; you just don't seem to grok that they aren't even attempting to account for the actual full economic, social, etc. impact (good or bad) of those regs. By their own admission.
You are trying to argue about the (direct only) cost of something without evaluating what other effects. Without that necessary analysis no reasonable conclusion (one way or the other) can be made. It's frankly, idiotic. It's like saying "well, cooking this food increases its cost by 80%, we should stop cooking food!"
You're saying that without these rules we'd be the same as 1920's America or China of today? So.. rules are all that make us what we are today? You have a very pessimistic view of society and one I fundamentally disagree with.
Yes, rules (e.g. government) are what is the basis of modern society. And your disagreement with reality is irrelevant. Even in 2016 american we quite happily ignore horrible environmental and societal ills (e.g. chinas ecological disaster and abuse of people) if we get shiny new toys cheaper and more profitably because of it.
It's a sad reality, but it is reality.
You're clearly an ideologue, and as with all ideologues you desperately want reality to conform to your pre-concieved ideas rather than accepting reality for what it is.
What does well-regulated mean? Well-regulated like the 1950's? Well-regulated like today? Well-regulated like the 1980's? What's the perfect balance between regulation and growth for you?
Well regulated means making sure that the costs,
including indirect, of businesses and their customers are taken on directly by those businesses and their customers instead of being foisted on society in general. Both because society should not be subsidizing corporations and because the costs of certain actions, such as pollution, are orders of magnitude MORE expensive to society if not taken care of promptly and correctly.
Put in a different way: Growth without sustainability it worthless. (just ask any competent businessman).
A great example is the area around Silverton, CO. You may recall a massive spill of toxic water into the Animas river a while back. That got a lot of attention, but the real disaster there is that that "massive" spill was actually just a drop in the bucket. The mines up there leak that much toxic waste in the Animas every couple days. Not to mention the innumerable tailings ponds that leech heavy metal and highly toxic chemical (e.g. cyanide) contamination into the watershed, open mine shafts, accidentally drained lakes, etc.
That situation is a perfect example of companies externalizing their costs and turning a manageable problem (proper containment/disposal of mine waste) into a full blown ecological disaster that will cost orders of magnitude more money (and more important things, like lives) to deal with now than if those companies had been held to better standards to begin with. There is now significant pollution from that area extending all the way to the pacific ocean. Millions of acres and billions of acre-feet of water seriously damaged.