The Competitive Enterprise Institute is out with the latest in a series of industry-friendly reports overcooking the supposed costs of regulation, while understating or simply ignoring the vast benefits to health, safety and the environment. Not surprisingly, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times were good enough to put the right-wing echo chamber in motion in its service.

A few quick thoughts: This report isn’t scholarship, it’s arithmetic advocacy—and it’s poor arithmetic at that.  The organization that sponsored the report is more concerned with advancing its political agenda of laissez faire government at all costs than it is with sound public policy. This report is meant to advance that agenda, rather than inform the ongoing debate over the U.S. regulatory system. After all, what good does it do to tally up the costs of regulation without providing an estimate of regulatory benefits with which to compare them? Policymakers and the media would do well to ignore this report.

The report’s findings appear to be based on several inflated regulatory cost estimates, lined up and added together to produce exactly what the author likely intended: a huge number. Some of the numbers come from estimates produced by regulatory agencies themselves, which several retrospective studies have shown to be systematically inflated. Others come from individual reports assembled by the author. To the extent that the CEI report is based on several different sources that relied on a variety of different methodologies, there is a large possibility that simply adding them up will result in a lot of double counting, further inflating the CEI report’s conclusion. The author of the CEI report, however, appears to make no effort to address this problem either.