OPINION:
The best part of Donald Trump’s economic speech on Monday was his temporary moratorium on federal agencies issuing new regulations.
As the daughter of a former small business-owner, I’ve witnessed the crushing effects of government regulations first-hand. My father has since sold his company and retired — as has many of his colleagues — and when they gather together for group dinners, one topic keeps coming up: None of them believe they could’ve owned or operated their businesses in today’s regulatory environment.
These are men and women who employed as many as 100 people in various industries, in a small town in upstate New York. It’s entrepreneurs like them who will be instrumental in reviving this country’s stagnant growth. They are the ones who will reinvigorate Main Streets across America and create jobs for able-bodied individuals.
In more than six years in office, President Barack Obama had imposed more regulations on these folks than then-President George Bush did in eight years, according to the American Action Forum, which tracks federal regulations that have an economic impact of $100 million or more and can significantly affect prices for consumers.
“Now, the administration has once again reached another record-breaking figure: 600 major regulations in roughly 7.5 years, which is 20 percent more than the previous president did in eight years,” the group said in its latest report, issued this month.
During Mr. Obama’s tenure, the nation has averaged roughly 81 major rules annually at a cost of $743 billion and 194 million hours of additional paperwork.
It’s numbers like these that puts small businesses under. Large, multinational corporations can sort through the additional paperwork and hire lawyers to fight them if necessary, at an incremental cost. Not so much the average small-town guy who owns a milk-hauling business or scrap shop.
Mr. Trump — a businessman himself — gets this. So he committed to issuing an executive order in his first days in office to impose a regulatory moratorium on new agency regulations. He then said he’d require each agency to prepare a list of list of their proposed regulations, ranked from most critical to least critical. The least critical regulations will then be on the chopping block.
A step in the right direction.
For, according to American Action Forum: “… someone must pay the cost for more than $740 billion in regulatory burdens. Employees could pay through reduced wages or unemployment. Shareholders could pay through lower returns. Eventually consumers could bear this burden in the form of higher prices.”
And small business owners could be put out of business.
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