Heretofore the demonstration that the benefits of a proposed rule exceeded its costs was the only ticket needed to have it promulgated as a final rule.
With the advent of regulatory budgeting the demonstration of positive net benefits for a proposed rule is a necessary but not sufficient condition for its promulgation as a final rule. Furthermore the advent of a regulatory budget harbors the introduction of Social Welfare Functions different from the maximization of national income benefits as the mechanism for ranking proposed rulemakings. The introduction of alternative Social Welfare Functions occurs because the implementation of a regulatory budget requires a public review of the totality of available rulemakings on a government-wide basis and the resultant debates result in the introduction of non-national efficiency considerations such as income distribution and stakeholder segmentation.
Listen at minute 3:30 of a ten minute video presentation on this concept. The initial draft of the paper background is here; the published version of the paper is here.
