Donald Trump promised to reduce regulations. He didn’t. – Orange County Register

Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Chesapeake, Virginia, Friday, June 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

This week, Donald Trump will officially become the Republican Party’s nominee.

He’s likely to be president again soon, according to the most accurate predictions, which come from people who put their money where their mouths are—people who bet. They currently give Trump a 67% chance of winning.

Joe Biden’s presidential chances have fallen below 20%.

This is good news for those of us who fear that America is being gradually strangled by more regulation.

Trump promises to get rid of bad regulations.

“Remove the anchor that’s holding us down!” he said. “We’re going to repeal all unnecessary, job-killing regulations!”

Trump was a real estate developer, so he was familiar with the thicket of regulations that often make getting things done nearly impossible.

But Republicans routinely talk about deregulation and then to add rules. The media called George W. Bush an “anti-regulator.” But when Bush became president, he appointed thousands of new regulators.

Trump was different.

After taking office, he hired regulation skeptics. He told government agencies: Get rid of two regulations for every new one you add!

But that didn’t happen. The growth of regulations slowed under Trump, but still increased.

I still think Trump’s anti-regulation stance is what caused stocks to rise and unemployment to fall. He sent a message to businesses: The government won’t crush you anymore! Businesses started hiring more people.

Of course, the media was not happy. Reporters Love regulation. The New York Times published the headline: “Donald Trump Is Trying to Kill You”!

What supporters of regulation fail to understand is that the unintended side effects of regulation often outweigh the benefits the regulation was intended to bring.

Cars built in smaller numbers (in line with Democratic policies that require more fuel economy) kill people. This is because smaller cars provide less protection.

“Should the government tell you what car to buy?” Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform complained in a video I recorded about Trump.

Norquist believes Trump has largely kept his promise of deregulation, which was a great decision for America.

For example, Trump repealed an Obama-era plan to classify franchises like McDonald’s as one business. Why was that a good thing?

“Trial lawyers want to be able to sue All McDonald’s, not just the local McDonald’s, if they spill coffee on each other,” Norquist says. “The unions want to unite All McDonald’s, not just one store. That would be a disaster.”

Trump’s FCC has repealed Obama’s “net neutrality” rules, which had slowed the growth of internet offerings by limiting providers’ freedom to set different prices.

Democrats cried foul. Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted that repeal would mean “the end of the internet as we know it.”

Instead, none of the predicted horrors happened (“They’ll cut you off!”). Innovation continued. The Internet simply got better.

And now the Biden administration wants to restore net neutrality!

They also want to ban election betting, a useful mechanism that allows us to better predict the future, and the election odds that I quote above.

Regulators give their crackdowns pretty names to make their regulations sound valuable: today they propose the Data Privacy Act, the Cybersecurity Resilience Act, the Fair Lending for All Act, etc.

“These regulations are named by regulators,” Norquist laughs. “They are advertisements for themselves.”

He jokes that regulators should, like pharmaceutical companies, list the side effects of their regulations: “They can cause unemployment, lower wages, raise energy costs…”

Trump’s record on deregulation would be better if he did not simultaneously introduce new regulations, such as tariffs.