White House reduces time Americans spend filling out federal paperwork to only 8.8 billion hours a year

They did it by changing the way federal agencies estimate how long it takes to complete their paperwork.

Via Chicago Tribune:

The article reported that the time needed to comply with federal paperwork — that is, the amount of time all of us spend filling out government forms — totaled 8.8 billion hours in fiscal 2010. As The Wall Street Journal's account then offered:

The good news? That's lower than the 9.8 billion hours logged the previous year.

The bad news? The drop is mostly due to a change in how federal agencies estimate how long it takes to complete their paperwork.

Do you see what's happening here? It's as if your dentist breezily declares that on the next visit you'll have less discomfort in her chair — because she now estimates that on the next visit you'll have less discomfort in her chair. Regardless of how much discomfort you in fact will have, isn't that reassuring prediction convenient for the dentist?

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Scary: Our Government has almost a million pages of what President Obama calls "commonsense safeguards"

President Obama claims he wants to reduce government regulation, but will not get rid of "commonsense safeguards." On the unlikely possibility he is serious, he has plenty of materiel to work with.

President Barack Obama recently promised a war on red tape, joining a line of American presidents stretching back to Jimmy Carter. This promise is frequently made — but seldom kept.

The number of pages in the Federal Register (a frequently cited measure of government red tape) has skyrocketed in recent decades, from 170,325 in the 1960s to 730,176 in the 2000s. The most recent estimate of the cost of all this federal regulation to businesses, their employees and their customers is $1.75 trillion per year.

Despite lip service to the contrary, too many presidents (and politicians in general) hold the wrongheaded belief that government has the power to cure what ails us.

Interestingly, there is a study that claims we could create 100 new jobs anually for every regulator fired.

This regulatory drag bears an economic cost: A new study by the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Policy Studies estimates that, on average, eliminating the job of a single regulator grows the American economy by $6.2 million and nearly 100 private sector jobs annually.

I seemed to have missed that part of President Obama's new jobs plan.