RUTHFULLY YOURS

“I’ve never seen anything like this.” — Donald Kenkel, Cornell University

Last week, the New York Times discovered that President Donald Trump was serious when he promised to liberate the economy from the oppressive weight of the regulatory state, describing it as “deregulation on a mass scale.”

Cornell’s Donald Kenkel, who was chief economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers in the first Trump administration, told the Times that “It’s going on much more quietly than some of the other fireworks we’re seeing, but it will have great impact.”

Great, indeed. In both senses of the word.

Gutting the regulatory state would free up massive amounts of pent-up economic energy, raise standards of living, lower inflation, and sharply cut the deficit, without unduly harming anyone (except busybody bureaucrats).

It’s hard to fathom just how gargantuan and intrusive the regulatory state has become over the past 100 years. Even the Times seems surprised, noting that “more than 400 federal agencies … regulate almost every aspect of American life.”

But that barely scratches the surface. Thursday, the Competitive Enterprise Institute released its annual “10,000 Commandments” report, which tracks the regulatory Leviathan. CEI calculates that the annual cost of complying with federal regulations is now $2.155 trillion.

Let’s put that in some context.

• That’s nearly four times what corporations pay in federal income taxes.

• It’s the equivalent of a $16,061 hidden tax on every U.S. household, notes CEI. That’s more than the average household pays for food, or health care, or transportation, or clothes.

• The Federal Register, where all federal rules and regulations are printed, now takes more than 106,000 pages to hold the 98 million words issued by unelected bureaucrats.

• If U.S. regulations were a country, it would be the world’s 8th-largest in the world — bigger than Canada.

Trump tried to weed out some of the regulatory underbrush in his first term, but he got a late start, and Joe Biden reversed course on many of the gains Trump managed. This time, Trump is better prepared, better armed, and far more aggressive.

Normally, eliminating a regulation is a cumbersome process that requires a federal agency to write an entirely new rule justifying why it’s getting rid of the old one. The process can take years and guarantees legal challenges.

Trump doesn’t want to wait that long. He directed federal agencies to produce a list by this week of regulations they want to eliminate, and plans to employ “a set of novel legal strategies … to simply repeal or just stop enforcing regulations,” as the Times puts it.

“They believe that the rapid repeal of some rules — and the stop-work order on enforcing others — will quickly and permanently uproot a vast network of regulations that many see as a safety net, but that they view as a drag on industry,” the Times reports. “Experts say there has never been such an immediate and comprehensive strategy to so quickly erase or freeze this many rules that are woven throughout so many dimensions of the American economy and daily life.”

If Trump succeeds, the economic impact will be immediate and profound. Research by the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis found that just freezing existing rules in place would boost economic growth, lower inflation, and cut the deficit over the next 10 years by more than $1 trillion.

“The potential economic and fiscal benefits (of rolling back regulations) are substantial,” the report notes.

But if Trump succeeds in pulling regulations out by their roots, it will be up to Congress to poison the soil so a future president can’t just replant them.

The 10,000 Commandments report includes a host of reforms that lawmakers need to pass to permanently dismantle the regulatory state.

These include:

• Terminate departments, agencies, commissions, and programs that no longer serve a legitimate purpose so they can no longer issue regulations.
• Require congressional approval for major rules.
• Increase regulatory transparency to the public, such as with a regulatory “report card.”
• Put sunset dates on all new regulations.

Democrats and the mainstream press will scream bloody murder. Ignore them. The regulatory state must be killed if a thriving economy is ever to live.