Protectionism Kills Jobs And Candidacies

Liberty Unyielding cited CEI on Trumps deregulation policy.

In the 2016 election, the GOP benefited from farm-state opposition to the Obama administration’s bureaucratic overreaching, such as the Obama administration’s attempts to restrict farming on farms with puddles or drainage ditches. (The Obama administration sought to prevent such farming under its authority to regulate navigable waters under the Clean Water Act; in the face of opposition from farmers, it partially backed off, but still heavily regulated land use in a regulation that was so sweeping that an appeals court issued an injunction against it. Later, the Trump administration rescinded the Obama administration’s regulation, only to have a judge in a different court block the rescinding of the regulation based on a procedural technicality. Eventually, the Trump administration will manage to kill off that regulation, but it remains in effect in some states for the time being, due to the latter court ruling).

Rather than getting into trade wars, or trying to renegotiate things like NAFTA, the Trump administration should focus more on eliminating harmful Obama-era regulations that prevented the economy from growing much.

The Trump administration has helped the economy by bringing an end to the vast wave of government red tape that occurred under Obama. The economy is now growing faster than was typical under Obama, unemployment is at a 49-year low, and wages are finally growing faster than inflation. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute noted, Trump has pruned regulations more vigorously than any president since Reagan, and his administration withdrew or delayed over “1,500 Obama rules” that were in the pipeline. Regulations cost the economy “$2 trillion annually. This amounts to a hidden tax of nearly $15,000 per household.” Trimming more regulations will result in “more jobs and higher wages,” more “investment,” and better “productivity.”

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