The temporary ban on travel from Sudan, Somalia, Libya etc. probably won’t turn out to be one of President Trump’s 20 most important executive orders of his first weeks on the job, despite the liberals’ hysteria over it. He signed a much more significant one today: “Trump wants to scrap two regulations for each new one adopted.” The Washington Post reports:
President Trump signed an order Monday aimed at cutting regulations on businesses, saying that agencies should eliminate at least two regulations for each new one.
The White House later released the text of the order, which added that the cost of any new regulation should be offset by eliminating regulations with the same costs to businesses.
The text of the order is here. It will warm your heart. President Trump has vowed to reduce the regulatory burden on business and thereby fuel economic growth. This is the down payment on that pledge.
The Post, of course, tries to find a negative in an order that will be viewed positively by 90% of voters:
But experts on government policy said Trump’s formulation made little sense. William Gale, a tax and fiscal policy expert at the Brookings Institution, said “the number of regulations is not the key. It’s how onerous regulations are. This seems like a totally nonsensical constraint to me.”
This is truly pathetic. The Post’s reporter, Steven Mufson, obviously called Mr. Gale for comment when neither Gale nor Mufson had seen the text of the order. Gale’s objection is directly addressed by the order itself, which says that it isn’t just a matter of eliminating two regulations for every new one; the cost of the new regulation must be offset by eliminating old regulations, as well. Despite Gale’s objection having been answered by the text of the order itself, Mufson left Gale’s disparaging but baseless comment in his article.
The Post raises various additional objections to Trump’s order, the bottom line being, it can’t be done. Ever-increasing government regulation is inevitable, liberals say, as is permanently slow growth. Most Americans may want a less onerous government, but the choice is not theirs: they can’t have it. That is what the liberals tell us. Maybe they will prove to be right, but President Trump struck a real blow for economic growth with his order today, and there is more where that came from.
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