meer;
Trump surrogates often outright lie about what his tax cuts did and whom they targeted. On the deregulation point, though, they typically avoid any specifics altogether. And they’re rarely asked follow-up questions about which onerous, job-killing government regulations they’re thinking of when they brag about how Trump has so wisely rolled them back.
Which is lucky for them. Because if you actually look over Trump’s regulatory rollbacks, it’s difficult to pinpoint which, if any, of them is supposedly unleashing all that (imaginary) growth.
Perhaps the economy-growing deregulations that Team Trump is thinking of are his dozens of environmental rule changes. These do indeed help a handful of companies save money — by, for instance, allowing them to dump more mercury and arsenic into the water supply, pump more methane and fine particulate matter into the air, and use a pesticide linked to neurological damage in children.
Presumably taking those options off the table could raise the cost of doing business, at least a little.
Or maybe Trumpkins are instead thinking of the rescission of a requirement for for-profit schools to disclose (and maintain minimum) employment outcomes as a condition of continuing to receive federal aid.
Or maybe they mean Trump’s repeal of a rule that said companies could only get lucrative government contracts upon certifying that they follow federal labor laws.
Or maybe it’s the relaxation of yet another rule dictating how many hours long-haul truck drivers can go without sleeping.
In each of these cases (and others), rolling back regulations might reduce costs and thereby boost profits for companies. But that doesn’t actually eliminate said costs. It just shifts them onto someone else — such as whoever lives downwind from the coal plant or happens to share the road with a sleep-deprived trucker.
In other words, those government-imposed, “job-killing” costs were there to address what economists call externalities: costs imposed upon third parties. Unlike, say, Trump’s pointless but still costly trade wars, they were designed to correct a market failure, not to make a functional market fail.
So maybe Trump’s comment about the interaction between burdensome government policies and “bad management” — that if you can’t handle a little extra government-imposed cost, you probably aren’t running a great business — was right, after all. He was just applying it to the wrong government policies. Listen to Trump’s insight, ye whiny, excuse-making businesses: If your company can stay afloat if and only if it dumps arsenic in the water, defrauds customers, cheats workers or gives kids brain damage, maybe you don’t deserve to be in business after all.