Trump - Part 4 - Less regulation

President Trump and the Republican Congress, as the supplement to their claim reducing taxes will boost the economy, say we also need to reduce regulation.  This idea also has been a Republican staple since at least the 1920's..

While the notion tax cuts are what we need right now is a fantasy, there is some merit to looking at reducing legislation.  However, we first have to draw a distinction.  

Nobody who has ever dealt with a government agency has any illusions that what they are doing is being done as efficiently as possible.  But making government agencies more efficient is time consuming drudgery, so generally that is not what politicians want to do.  They want to just abolish or cripple the regulatory effectiveness of agencies they oppose for ideological reasons.

Historically the two biggest financial collapses in our country grew directly out of ideological undermining of financial regulation.  Republicans took control of Congress in 1919 ideologically committed to "freeing" banks and financial institutions from government regulation and the promptly acted on that belief.  Greed and market pressure soon prevailed over good sense and we ended up in the great depression of the 1930's where 5000 banks failed (and their depositors lost all their savings), millions of homes were foreclosed upon, and unemployment soared to 25% of the workforce by 1933.

The next time the Republicans gained control of the Congress for a period more than two years was in 1996.  Again Republicans ideologically committed to  - yes, you guessed it - "freeing banks from burdensome regulation" - went at it with gusto.  10 years later we were sliding into the Great Recession, where huge banks had to be saved by infusions of taxpayer cash to avoid a full on depression.

Now Republicans are again claiming business needs to be free of burdensome regulations.  Given their history I can only imagine they are going to cut what works and leave alone what doesn't work.