I did govt regulation for a year. I went to expensive training courses. I worked with the regulation folks from other companies. I spoke with the folks that implemented the regulation at various federal agencies. I was the guy that had to translate US regs into company procedures. No American does, or physically can, understand regulation. It is physically not possible. Even the BEST regulation person I ever met (former Customs officer, licensed customs broker, etc) had to look things up all day long.
Regulation required not-cheap salaries for people to understand it. Regulation causes red tape to be tossed across every department in the company. Required training. Required procedures. etc etc. That's all overhead and loss of productivity. There's lost business opportunities because companies could buy the same stuff from Europe and have stuff overnighted instead of taking months to legally export. No, I am NOT exaggerating.
My auditing binder was "larger than the family bible".
You have NO idea how much time and money it took to ensure that we could prove we did not all our four Canadian employees to view a Wescam FLIR (made in Canada) being installed onto an aircraft being sold to Canada. If we DID allow a Canadian national to see the FLIR being installed, or WE COULD NOT PROVE THAT HE DIDN'T (yes, legal presumption of guilt, yes it has held up in court), we'd do a voluntary disclosure. That isn't cheap to prepare and is very disruptive to business. It could range from nothing... To millions in fines. It's more or less entirely arbitrary punishment, and depends on a lot of factors. How much the government agency likes you, how many expensive lawyers you have, the political climate at the time, etc.
A LOT of stuff that was listed as a controlled munition hasn't been made in the US in decades. It was high tech back during the Cold War, so it's just as controlled today. It's been a huge boat anchor on the aerospace industry. And that's just ITAR. EAR isn't so bad, actually. You'd merely want to weep upon reading it, now go catatonic while whispering "The horror, the horror."
$1.75 trillion is a believable low ball number.