Guest Post by John Stossel
President Donald Trump promised he’d get rid of bad rules.
“Remove the anchor dragging us down!” he said when campaigning for president. “We’re going to cancel every needless job-killing regulation!”
Trump was a developer, so he knew that the thicket of rules government imposes often makes it impossible to get things done.
But would he keep his deregulation promise? I was skeptical.
Republicans often talk deregulation but then add rules. People called President George W. Bush an “anti-regulator.” But once he was president, he hired 90,000 new regulators!
Trump has been different.
When he took office, he hired regulation skeptics. He told government agencies: Get rid of two regulations for every new one you add.
I think his anti-regulation attitude is why stock prices rose and unemployment dropped. Trump sent a message to business: Government will no longer try to crush you. Businesses then started hiring.
Of course, the media wasn’t happy. Reporters love regulation.
They call Trump’s moves “an attack on the environment” and on “workers’ health.” The New York Times ran the headline “Donald Trump Is Trying to Kill You!”
What the media don’t get is that regulations have unintended side effects that often outweigh the good they’re intended to do.
Cars built smaller to comply with President Obama’s rules that require doubling of gas mileage cause increased deaths because smaller cars provide less protection.
“Should the government tell you what kind of car to buy?” asks Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform in my new video about Trump.
Norquist says that Trump has largely kept his deregulation promise, and that’s been great for America.
For example, Trump repealed the Obama-era plan to classify franchise businesses like McDonald’s as one single business. Why?
“The trial lawyers want to be able to sue all of McDonald’s, not just the local McDonald’s, if they spill coffee on themselves,” says Norquist. “And the labor unions want to unionize all McDonald’s, not just the one store. That would have been a disaster.”
Trump’s FCC repealed Obama’s “net neutrality” rule, which would have limited internet providers’ freedom to charge different prices.
Democrats and other regulation-lovers predicted repeal would mean that rich people would dominate the internet. Bernie Sanders even tweeted that repeal would mean “the end of the internet as we know it.”
Of course, none of those things happened. Or as Norquist puts it: “None of it! None of it!”
But some Obama regulations sounded so important.
Norquist laughs at that. “The names for these regulations are written by regulators. They’re advertisements for themselves.”
Of course, unlike advertisers, regulators don’t list side effects of their rules, which Norquist says should read: “May cause unemployment, may reduce wages, may raise the cost of energy, may make your car not drivable.”
Trump’s deregulation record would be better were he not so eager to add regulations, such as tariffs, at the same time.
“There is a challenge. Trump is a protectionist in many ways,” says Norquist, sadly. “Tariffs are taxes, and regulations on the border are regulations on consumers.”
So are Trump’s “buy American” rules.
“That sounds like a good idea, but it’s a dumb idea, and I wish he hadn’t done it,” says Norquist. “That is not deregulation. The good news is that the vast majority of the acts have been deregulatory and tremendously helpful.”
Recently, Trump announced, “We have cut 22 regulations for every new regulation!”
He exaggerated, as he often does. The real number is about five. But that’s still pretty good. Better than Ronald Reagan did.
I wish Trump would do more.
I wish he’d remove his tariffs and agricultural subsidies and kill the Export-Import Bank, drug prohibition and the onerous rules that encourage illegal immigration by making it almost impossible for foreigners to work here legally.
Keep your promise, President Trump! Repeal 22 regulations for every new one!
Nevertheless, so far, mostly good.
Every excessive rule repealed is a step in the right direction: toward freedom.
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No thank you asshole. Americas jobs belong to Americans, not every swinging dick that jumps the border and will work for peanuts, which further erodes the standard of living in whose country with which this belongs to.
Trump exaggerates. Not 22 but 5 regs eliminated for every new one.
Just wondering, John.
Can you source the 90,000 count of regulators that Shrub hired?
Sounds like an exaggeration to me.
Not defending Dubya’s actions during 2 terms;
The Patriot Act has quite a few unintended consequences and is one of the worst set of regs Cheney hatched, but 90,000 were enlisted to write new regulations?
A 2nd point.
If tariffs are used to leverage a renegotiation of grossly unfair trade imbalances, then their negative stereotype might be a bit flawed.
Perhaps tariffs are a tax on biz and some consumers.
But if Obama set up trade policies and agreements that rape the USA, then Trumpy using tariffs to correct that might be some short term pain in exchange for long term gain, no?
Likewise, repealing nonsensical subsidies to reign in wasteful spending on Fed money grabbing industries seems to be an attempt to truly MAGA.
Just a two cents opinion, from a voice in the cheap seats of the bleachers. The peanut gallery.
Better than popcorn, during this picture show entertainment.
Sigh…bread and circuses.
I would figure that the criminal NCLB regs and the ones tied to the economic back-breaking Medicare Part D, would have generated at least that many new job requirements.
Forming TSA and Federalizing security at every airport, etc. would go a long way to get to that number.
Deregulation of the financial sector is what caused the 2008 collapse.
Wrong, it was Democrats and Obama.
Do you remember how we told you that the Democrats and groups associated with them leaned on banks and even sued to get them to make bad loans under the Community Reinvestment Act which was a factor in causing the economic crisis (see HERE ) … well look at what some fellow bloggers have dug up while researching Obama’s legal career. Looks like a typical ACORN lawsuit to get banks to hand out bad loans.
https://www.mediacircus.com/2008/10/obama-sued-citibank-under-cra-to-force-it-to-make-bad-loans/
The Clinton administration did the same shit with loan standards in the 1990s.
As well as Reagan before;
The Reagan administration supported by Wall Street, economist and financial lobbyist began a 30 year period of financial deregulation.
In 1982 the Reagan Administration deregulated the savings and loan companies allowing them to make risky investments with depositors money. By the end of the decade hundreds of S&L companies had failed. This crisis cost taxpayers 124 billion dollars and cost many people their life savings. Thousands of S&L executives went to jail for looting their companies. One of the most extreme cases was Charles Keating. In 1985 when regulators started investigating him, Keating hired a economist named Alan Greenspan. In a letter to regulators, Greenspan praised Keatings sound business practices and expertise and said he saw no risk in allowing Keating to invest his customers money. Keating paid Greenspan $40,000 dollars to write that letter. Keating went to prison afterwards, as for Greenspan, Reagan appointed him chairman of the Federal Reserve.
The 1986 Tax Act retroactively removed the statutory good will given to S+Ls and then persecuted them….That’s why so many failed…
FALSE!
Deregulation:
In the early 1980s Congress passed two laws with the intent to deregulate the Savings and Loans industry, the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980 and the Garn–St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982. These laws allowed thrifts to offer a wider array of savings products (including adjustable-rate mortgages), but also significantly expanded their lending authority and reduced regulatory oversight. These changes were intended to allow S&Ls to “grow” out of their problems, and as such represented the first time that the government explicitly sought to influence S&L profits as opposed to promoting housing and home ownership. Other changes in thrift oversight included authorizing the use of more lenient accounting rules to report their financial condition, and the elimination of restrictions on the minimum numbers of S&L stockholders. Such policies, combined with an overall decline in regulatory oversight (known as forbearance), would later be cited as factors in the collapse of the thrift industry.
Between 1982 and 1985, S&L assets grew by 56% (compared to growth in commercial banks of 24%). In part, the growth was tilted toward financially weaker institutions which could only attract deposits by offering very high rates and which could only afford those rates by investing in high-yield, risky investments and loans.
The deregulation of S&Ls in 1980, by the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act signed by President Jimmy Carter on March 31, 1980, gave them many of the capabilities of banks without the same regulations as banks, without explicit FDIC oversight. Savings and loan associations could choose to be under either a state or a federal charter. This decision was made in response to the dramatically increasing interest rates and inflation rates that the S&L market experienced due to vulnerabilities in the structure of the market. Immediately after deregulation of the federally chartered thrifts, state-chartered thrifts rushed to become federally chartered, because of the advantages associated with a federal charter. In response, states such as California and Texas changed their regulations to be similar to federal regulations.
False:
Obama didn’t take office until 1-09. Before that Bush was president and deregulated the financial sectors derivatives markets just like Clinton before him and the repeal of Glass-Steagal. Most of this happened on Clinton and Bush’s watch, not Obama as you say. Obama inherited that mess from the two preceding administrations.
Then came the derivatives exposures. This compiled bad loans into a financial instruments, CDO’s, collateralized debt obligations. These CDO’s were insured in case the debtors defaulted, the investors would still get paid in another instrument known as credit default swaps. This in turn encouraged lenders to make bad loans to unqualified borrowers.
Credit rating agency’s Moodys, Standard and Poors, and Fitch gave these toxic instruments AAA ratings when they were really DDD. Brooksley Born testified before congress to warn of these mostly unregulated instruments and the systemic risk they pose.
The repeal of the Glass Steagall act under Clinton and the deregulation of the energy markets, think ENRON, under Bush is what led to the Greatest Heist in history in 2008 and 2009.
IMO, the major cause of the 2006-2009 housing collapse was neither deregulation of the financial sector or the CRA – although both played a part. It was the fact that humans only live ~ 80 years and only remember the last 70 years or so, max. There had been a real estate collapse in the 30’s in the wake of the 1929 stock crash. There had been a collapse 60-70 years before that. People get complacent about things that haven’t caused a problem lately. There was widespread belief that – aside from a few localized and short term downturns – the housing sector in the US had “never” had a real collapse. That wasn’t true. There had been a collapse, but no one was old enough to remember it. The “quants” who, in the 2000’s, used statistics to “prove” that reduced documentation mortgage loans had little risk largely believed their own bullshit. Their stats were from only the prior 15 years or so – too short a period to be valid, and the quants themselves were too young to remember even the housing collapse in Texas after the oil bust in the ’80’s. Sure, there were a few prescient Wall Streeters who bet against those loans, but most mortgage investors OBVIOUSLY believed the proposition that the risk was minimal or they wouldn’t have invested (or trusted the worthless “credit default swaps” that supposedly insured against loss). Bubbles burst; it just takes longer than expected sometimes.
There were a lot of things the government did to cause the financial crash of ’08. CRA certainly led to the housing crisis and the repeal of Glass-Stegall led to the lowered stability of the financial insitutions. Once they came up with the idea of packaging sub-prime mortgages and selling them as deriviatives, it was not long before the House of Cards (pun intended) came crashing down. For a detailed explanation I suggest a book by Scott Nations “The History of the United Stats in Five Crashes”
Here is a quick video with some of the politicians involved with the housing crash.
Dudes, THEY ARE ALL GUILTY – Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Shrub, Owebomber.
https://bongino.com/breaking-trump-seriously-considering-ending-birthright-citizenship-for-children-of-illegal-immigrants/
https://www.cnsnews.com/blog/craig-bannister/dan-bongino-cut-bs-liberalism-cancer-it-destroys-every-single-thing-it-touches?utm_source=sumome&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=sumome_share
This was floated out a year ago (MOL) … do it or STFU.
this is not a regulation that he is about to undo but it is a scotus decision–
he is going to start holding families that are picked up at the border longer than 20 days so that their cases can be decided instead of releasing them–
https://dailycaller.com/2019/08/20/trump-flores-settlement-dhs-families-terminate/?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=9776