This one requires that government agencies eliminate ten existing regulations for every new one they want to implement.
It should go without saying, but what something costs and what it is worth are two related but different things.
To illustrate:
Unless you're scrounging for sustenance in the wild, you need money to buy (or grow) food.
If the only thing that mattered about food is how much it costs, then you could just stop paying to have it and hold on to that money.
But then you would die from starvation.
In other words, it makes no sense to think about costs without also thinking about benefits.
Now — while it may not be quite so on the nose — the story is not really all that different when it comes to regulations.
- For decades, Big Business has been whining about "red tape." (Yet corporate profits just keep going up and up and up and up and up and ...)
- They manufactured a whole industry to over-estimate the costs of regulations. Time and time again, corporate cost estimates prove to be wildly overblown.
- And corporations always manage to leave out the massive benefits regulations have for the American people and our economy.
- In fact, every major regulation has monetary benefits that outweigh the costs — even using corporate-influenced numbers that inflate costs and lowball benefits.
- Then, most importantly, there are the non-monetary benefits.
- When not undermined by corporate greed or political fecklessness or outright corruption, regulations are the safeguards that keep our air and water clean. They keep our food and medicines safe. They protect workers, ensure fairness, and make our economy safer and more just. And much, much more.
So of course, financial "genius" that he is, Donald Trump — along with assistant president Elon Musk — wants to get rid of them.
Trump already tried this in his first term. Except then the requirement was "only" to kill two regulations for every new one.
Join Public Citizen in a message for Donald Trump:
As if there isn't already ample evidence that you are just atrociously, pathetically, pathologically bad at economics, here you are with another stupid demand to kill regulatory protections that make the American people — including those who voted for you — safer and more prosperous. We're not going to bother asking you to revoke your idiotic and illegal "one-in-ten-out" executive order, because asking you to be smarter about this, or less in thrall to Big Business, would be a waste of breath. But we do want you to know we're paying attention and will fight this with everything we've got.
Click to add your name now.
Thanks for taking action.
For progress,
- Robert Weissman & Lisa Gilbert, Co-Presidents of Public Citizen
No comments:
Post a Comment