This morning, I heard Trump said something in his “Gettysburg Address” that was almost as good. Instead of saying, “form committees to go through the CFR throwing out regulations”, he called for, “Eliminating two federal regulations for every one passed.”. This would be a good start. I'd rather see elimination of three or four old for every new one - if nothing else, it's good busy work to keep the roaches in DC busy, and not passing more new laws. That's not happening without a strong national movement, or strong leadership.
If you haven't seen it, The Federalist Papers Project has a good summary of the talk. It actually sounds pretty good to me.
- Push a constitutional amendment for term limits for members of Congress.
- A hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce federal workforce through attrition, exempting military public safety and public health.
- A permanent Ban on members of the Executive administration from ever becoming political lobbyists.
- Eliminating two federal regulations for every one passed.
- Repeal the “Obamacare Disaster” and provide relief to American families.
- Impose tough tariffs on foreign imports to keep American companies from moving overseas.
- Immediately open up energy production to jumpstart our economy.
- Appoint judges who will strictly uphold the Constitution.
- Immediately begin renegotiating NAFTA to make it a better deal.
Trump also said he would cancel “every unconstitutional executive action, memorandum and order issued by Barack Obama, cancel funding for sanctuary cities, remove all of the more than 2 million criminal illegal immigrants from the country. “These are our drug dealers, gang heads, gang members, killers, and cancel visas to foreign countries that won’t take them back.”I don't like the idea of “tough tariffs”, because tariffs attract negative attention. There's more than one way to discourage companies from moving overseas. Aside from that, I have to say I like that agenda.
Mrs. Graybeard and I were saying to each other that we really seem to take a different view of this process than the vibe we pick up from the nevertrump crowd. We were watching Dr. Krauthammer, whom I generally respect, talk about how he can't vote for Trump in good conscience so he's going to write in someone. Both of us look at this as if we're hiring someone to do a job for us not some mystical grand leader on a white horse who's going to rescue us and make everything wonderful. To use the small business analogy, our little radio shop has gotten too busy for us to manage by ourselves and we've got to hire help. We've interviewed two applicants for the position. Neither applicant is ideal in any sense and we really don't like either one, but one is clearly better than the other. We'd rather have someone better but we only have these two, and we need somebody because we don't have enough hands to do everything ourselves. All we can do is hire the best one we can and hope they're better than they seem.
The implementation of the regulation thing is a big tricky. It's easy enough to write a "regulation" that actually contains hundreds of regulations. To do this effectively, a concise definition of regulation must be accepted, otherwise you will get something like "Regulation Gazillion+1: Create the Department of Regulatory Controls" which will have any number of regulations within it.
ReplyDeleteIn my experience with FAA and FCC regs, they're pretty specific. They do use an outline form, so (picking one at random) section 87.143 has paragraphs a-f and some of those have sub-paragraphs. Each is a specific regulation or set of regulations. You wouldn't want to get rid of a higher level paragraph that's referred to later. Getting rid of regulations would require re-organizing the material.
DeleteWhich is a good exercise to go through. And more busy work for the roaches in DC.
In my work, every product would have to perform tests to FCC regulations and to aviation industry regulations. The industry regulations were always tougher than the FCC, yet testing for the FCC and submitting the report was a major effort. Why do we need to do it at all? The FCC requirements could simply say to test to the relevant industry document. That would eliminate hundreds of FCC rules. (As an aside, we'd have to test to specific customer's requirements that were tougher than the industry requirements, too).
Exactly. As I said, it is a non-trivial exercise, and it will take some very dedicated genius to thin the thicket.
DeleteMaybe its my age, but I kind of like Trump. Trump seems real, like he's worked with the kind of people I've been around.
ReplyDeleteI think he gets it that regulations are killing us. So many (most?) don't even accomplish their stated goal. But rather than remove them, more are piled on.
Hillary (and all career politicians) don't understand regulation problems because they've never had to create something to sell.
Hillary and her ilk's "solution" to the regulatory problem is....(get ready for it!)....MORE REGULATIONS!!
ReplyDeleteOM regulations: A better way to handle it would be to require that all regulations be submitted to a vote in both houses and signed by the president. AND that all regulations must undergo a public reviewing period before being submitted. AND that all regulations (and laws) must sunset after five years and go through the same process again to be approved.
ReplyDeleteIt needs a two pronged approach: eliminate many, if not most, of the restrictive regulations that impede business competition, and impose on Congress its Constitutional law making requirement - laws should come from Congressional action, not as regulations created by n executive agency. Knowledge and understanding of how out government is supposed to work is at an all time low so a majority do not know - or seem to care - that Congress has specific performance requirements under the Constitution and that executive agencies are a different, and competing, part of the governmental structure. I'd vote for SiG's 4-to-1 ratio, but baby steps - get people used to the 2-to-1 requirement, then ramp up.
ReplyDeleteThe real nut to crack is the existence of non-Constitutional agencies; if there's no U.S. Department of Education/Housing and Urban Development/Health and Human Services/etc. then there are no government-paid drones to create regulations, it would all have to come from Congress as bills introduced and voted into law status.
Which brings us back to term limits to eliminate "extreme incumbency." Actually, along with repeal of the 17th Amendment, I'd like to see a Constitutional limit on length of service in all elected positions in the U.S., from dogcatcher in Podunk to President. A lifetime maximum of 5 or 6 terms, or portions thereof, no more than 2 of which may be in the same office, and any service in elected office produces a lifetime ban on receiving remuneration of any type from any government in the U.S. except for salary, benefits and retirement commensurate with rank in the U.S. armed forces, would go a long way toward eliminating our permanent ruling class.
I'm not a Trump fan, but if he can get 1/3 of this done, it will be a Godsend to the Republic!
ReplyDeleteCertainly better than the Soros agenda put for by the communists...
gfa