Trump's Doomed War on Regulations

It’s now going on 10 years since I appeared on a panel about the future of conservatism and proposed that it was time for the Republican Party to stop focusing so much on tax cuts, and start thinking more about regulation. Oh, sure, tax cuts are a nice goodie to hand your base. But outside of the donor class, they’re just not that big a goodie, because decades of Republican tax-cutting have already reduced most peoples’ effective tax rates to negligible amounts. Moreover, the taxes that voters still notice are often things like sales taxes and property taxes, over which national-level politicians have no control.

Regulation, on the other hand, has grown steadily since the Reagan era. To take one crude metric: the number of pages in the Federal Register has grown by more than 50 percent since Reagan took office. That of course does not count state- and local-level regulations.