The Trump administration deregulation efforts will raise incomes by about $3,100 per household over the next five to 10 years, and sharply reduce prices for consumers, according to a report released Friday by the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
“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,” Casey Mulligan, the chief economist for the Council of Economic Advisers, told reporters Friday. “These deregulatory actions are raising real incomes by increasing competition, productivity, and wages.”
The Council of Economic Advisers report is titled “The Economic Effects of Federal Deregulation Since January 2017: An Interim Report.”
The report takes a sampling of 20 major deregulatory efforts, which it projects alone will save consumers and businesses about $220 billion annually, and increase after-inflation incomes by 1.3%.
“Many of the most notable deregulatory efforts in American history, such as the deregulation of airlines and trucking that began during the Carter administration, did not have such large aggregate effects,” the Council of Economic Advisers report says.
The aggressive deregulation also cuts consumer prices for prescription drugs, health insurance, and telecommunications, removes mandates from employers, and eliminates rules keeping small lenders from the marketplace, the report says.
The report talks about the hidden costs of regulations.
“The ongoing introduction of costly regulations had previously been subtracting an additional 0.2 percent per year from real incomes, thereby giving the false impression that the American economy was fundamentally incapable of anything better than slow growth,” the Council of Economic Advisers report says. “Now, new regulations are budgeted and kept to a minimum.”
The report says prescription drug prices have long outpaced inflation, but in the last two years, price hikes fell by more than 11%, and even below inflation. It says that in 2018, prescription prices, “even declined in nominal terms over the calendar year for the first time since...
