The Patriot Post® · Trump Deregulation Boosts American Families
The White House Council of Economic Advisers released a report last Friday indicating that President Donald Trump’s deregulation efforts will lead to increased household incomes by an average of $3,100 over the next decade. You may read Leftmedia reports about how the current economic expansion is only making the rich richer and “everyone else not so much,” but the truth is most American families have benefited from a healthy economy.
The chief economist on the council, Casey Mulligan, explained, “The deregulatory efforts of the Trump administration have also removed mandates from employers, especially smaller businesses, and have removed burdens that would have eliminated many small bank lenders from the marketplace. These deregulatory actions are raising real incomes by increasing competition, productivity, and wages.”
The report also notes the hidden cost of regulations, stating, “The ongoing introduction of costly regulations had previously been subtracting an additional 0.2 percent per year of real incomes, thereby giving the false impression that the American economy was fundamentally incapable of anything better than slow growth. Now, new regulations are budgeted and kept to a minimum.”
One of the most notable examples of Trump’s deregulation impact has been on prescription-drug costs. Over the past two years, prescription price increases, which have almost always outpaced the inflation rate, fell by more than 11% below the inflation rate and, the report says, “even declined in nominal terms over the calendar for the first time since 1972.” The report estimates “that the results of these actions will save consumers almost 10 percent on retail prescription drugs, which results in an increase of $32 billion per year in the purchasing power of the incomes of Americans (including both consumers and producers).”
The stock market has also benefitted from Trump’s deregulatory efforts, as stocks had “their best June in decades, capping a strong first half of 2019,” The Washington Post reported. Another area of deregulation benefits everyone with an automobile. Thanks to the fracking revolution, the U.S. has become the world’s largest oil producer, and the International Energy Agency says we can expect enough supply in 2020 to more than offset increased demand. That may keep prices stable or even reduced.
Meanwhile, Rasmussen released a recent poll of likely voters finding that a clear majority aligns more with Trump’s platform than with the Democrats’. A majority of voters (54%) saw the Democrat presidential candidates as being outside the mainstream and even extreme in their leftist platform. Instead of tacking to the middle, Democrat candidates seem committed to outdoing each other in their race to the extreme Left, and voters are noticing. That’s especially true when Trump’s policies are benefiting Americans across the board.