February 6, 2017
President Trump met recently with CEOs from a dozen major manufacturers, including Ford, Dell, Lockheed Martin, Tesla, Johnson & Johnson and more. The Trump administration’s message was simple and two-fold:
- Cuts to corporate taxes and onerous regulations are coming
- If manufacturing moves outside the U.S., expect stiff import tariffs
The president told the CEOs that his administration would like to cut corporate taxes from 35 percent to 15-20 percent. Surely this message resonates with businesspeople nationwide. However, it would still require the approval of Congress, which is no sure bet.
As for regulations, President Trump indicated his team is committed to reducing regulations that increase costs and limit jobs.
What does that mean exactly? The specifics are still coming out, but President Trump did mention cutting regulations by 75 percent or more. He’s even floated a “two-for-one” idea that would require two regulations be removed for every new one that is proposed.
This should be music to business owners’ ears because we frequently hear businesses can’t do anything about overbearing regulations. Some firms even have more people working on regulatory requirements than on products and services!
Interestingly, the CEOs at the meeting said that if they were given a choice of tax cuts or regulatory repeals, they would choose the latter. That’s quite telling of how much overregulation is hurting us.
To prove the point, let’s examine this news against the backdrop of former President Obama’s administration. President Obama broke records with the amount of regulation produced. Look no further than The Federal Register, which is the official governmental record. The 2016 version stood at nearly 95,000 pages and totaled almost 3,800 new regulations.
It will be interesting to see how this two-for-one deregulation “sale” unfolds!