Trump’s Anti-Regulation Efforts May Be Wishful Thinking

While many small business owners are celebrating Barak Obama’s exit as Commander-In-Chief, Peter Schiff is skeptical about Trump repealing enough Federal regulations to help return us to a free market. Small business owners face many more problems finding financing and handling business regulations than corporations.

“I think a lot of this optimism is unfounded. I mean yes there may be some regulation that gets repealed under a Trump administration, but we have been disappointed in the past. There were a lot of new regulations under prior Republican administrations. Look at the new regulations that we got under Bush. I remember Bush Sr. That’s where we got the Americans with Disabilities Act. That caused all sorts of problems for small business, and that was passed under a Republican president.”

Although many small business owners came out to the polls for Trump, their enthusiasm and optimism at the change in regulatory power the government wields is likely to run up against the reality of the career politician—someone who’s long experience of writing laws is usually divorced from their everyday consequences.

One place where government over-reach is the most impactful is in the healthcare system. While Trump and Republicans are vowing to repeal and replace, they’re likely to exchange the current program with another government-run alternative. Of course, this will only exacerbate the problem because it was the government’s intervention that’s fueld the skyrocketing price in healthcare.

“People say ‘well you want to go back to the free market. Well, that’s what we had before Obamacare!’ No, that’s not what we had before Obamacare. We didn’t have the free market. If we’d had a free market health care, we wouldn’t have needed Obamacare. The reason we needed Obamacare was because the government has already screwed up health care so much, it was so expensive that people wanted a solution.”
 
Highlights from the show:

“They should try to completely separate healthcare from employment, and you do that in the tax code very easy. What you do is either you say that if an employer provides healthcare to his workers, then the value of that healthcare insurance is included in taxable income. Now you can lower the tax rates because you have more income that’s subject to tax.”

“Right now, workers are indifferent between money and insurance. Workers have an incentive: ‘Don’t pay me cash where I have to pay income taxes. Just give me some health insurance which I get tax free.’” The other way to change it…is just to let individuals fully deduct whatever they spend on their health insurance…For anybody who pays income taxes, if you buy health insurance you get to deduct the cost. Then more people with get their health insurance the way they get their auto insurance or their fire insurance for their homeowners insurance. Get rid of those incentives, get businesses out of the healthcare industry, and allow individuals to shop around to buy their own insurance.”

“The big problem in medical care is that too many people use insurance for everyday items. We don’t want you spraining your ankle and then billing it to the insurance company. Things like that should be paid for out of pocket with cash the way they were before everybody started doing it through insurance. Once you have a third party player, you no longer have free market controls on costs and costs skyrocket.”

“We should be getting rid of Medicaid and Medicare. Before we had any of this stuff, we had a much better healthcare system. It was more affordable, and doctors had a lot of free time. They didn’t have to spend all their time filling out forms and paperwork. So to the extent that there are poor people who couldn’t afford medical care, they got it for free.”
 

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