Trump’s Deregulation Promises – Past and Future

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

He will probably be president again soon, according to the most accurate predictions, which come from people who put their money where their mouth is — 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 add regulations. 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 ran 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 smaller (in line with Democratic policies that require greater fuel economy) kill people. This is because smaller cars provide less protection in crashes.

“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For example, Trump repealed an Obama-era plan to classify franchises like McDonald’s as one business.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?

“The 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 unionize all McDonald’s, not just one store. That would be a disaster.”

The Federal Communications Commission under President Trump has repealed Barack Obama’s “net neutrality” rules, which had slowed the growth of internet offerings by limiting providers’ freedom to set different prices.

Democrats cried foul. Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, tweeted that repeal would mean “the end of the internet as we know it.”

Instead, none of the predicted terrible things happened (you’ll get cut off!). Innovation continued. The Internet simply got better.

But now the Biden administration wants to restore net neutrality.

He also wants to ban election betting, a useful mechanism that allows us to better predict the future, and the election odds I cited 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.

“Trump is a protectionist in many ways,” Norquist says ruefully. “Tariffs are taxes, and border regulations are consumer regulations.”

When Trump took office, he announced, “For every one new regulation, we roll back 22 regulations!”

But that’s not true. America’s deep state is hard to combat. Many of the 22 million Americans who work for the government feel they’re not doing their job if they don’t impose more regulation.

Despite Trump’s promises, he left America with more regulations than we had when he took office.

I hope that incoming President Trump will cut tariffs and farm subsidies, and abolish the Export-Import Bank, drug prohibition, and thousands of other regulations that do more harm than good.

Each repeal of a regulation is a step towards freedom.

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