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Trump just can’t help himself from lying about successfully reducing regulations,

The one item that writers and fellow bloggers can say about the current commander-in-chief, for someone that lies on an hourly basis, it sure gives us all plenty of ammunition to write about.

At the Washington Post, they were forced to established a whole new department with multiple employees, just for Fact Checking the president and his administration.

As was demonstrated by one Trump advocate who asked a reporter on a national cable TV show, while outing Trump’s economic successes, “Trump has done things that haven’t happened in decades.  When is the last time you saw a US fiscal quarter with a 4% increase?” 

The reporter’s response:  “Four times in the last three years of the Obama administration!”

So now this lying is happening, even thru his own vice president’s comments.

Per Vice President Pence and his remarks at a presentation in St Louis: “This President has actually repealed 22 federal regulations for every new federal rule put on the books. He’s repealed more federal regulations than any president in American history. It’s true.”

This is one of the Trump administration’s favorite talking points that “the president has repealed more federal regulations than any president in history.”  Another favorite is that the president has repealed 22 federal regulations for every new regulation placed on the books.  If this were true, this would seriously exceed a campaign promise to repeal two regulations for every one implemented.

But, as has been reported before, the claim of eliminating more regulations than any previous president simply cannot be verified as there is not enough data to support this statement. There is data that indicates that growth in regulations have slowed significantly under President Trump, but that’s apparently not a good enough story to tell from Trump and his administration’s perspective.

Meanwhile, this 22-1 claim was debunked by experts after Trump announced it last December and yet the administration continues to make the claim.

All of this started with Trump’s “Contract with the American Voter,” where he pledged that for every federal regulation, two existing regulations must be eliminated. Shortly after taking office, the president then signed an executive order that aimed to put this policy into effect.

The order also said the cost of any new regulation should be offset by eliminating regulations with the same costs to businesses.

Back in December, with great fanfare, the president announced he had done even better than planned, eliminating 22 regulations for every one enacted in fiscal 2017.

However, when the experts started studying the list of 67 “deregulatory” actions, they found that the figures were very questionable, as is usual with many of Trump’s statements.

As documented by Bloomberg News, the listed actions include ones initiated by previous presidents.  As you would expect in Russia, Bloomberg found that Trump had double counted and there were relatively inconsequential steps. One action that was listed as deregulatory, was having to do with immigration.  But the action actually imposed new burdens on businesses participating in an the expanded visa program.

In addition, Bloomberg also found that at least 22 of the 67 claimed actions were actually begun under President Barack Obama.

Cary Coglianese, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, faulted the list for including many deregulatory actions that were relatively minor compared to the more substantial regulatory actions. He wrote: “It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that administration officials are removing 22 ‘Peter Rabbit’ books from the regulators’ shelves for every one like ‘War and Peace”.

As is usual with the Trump administration, they could have just told the truth and it would have still been a positive story.

This deception all goes way back to when the Trump Towers were being built and Trump realized that the near-by General Motors building was taller and had more floors.  Well, just as Trump has always falsely said he was an inch taller than he really is, he came up with a story where he claimed in all his PR materials that the Trump Tower had 68 floors instead of its actual 58 floors.

Though the tower was built with only 58 floors, Mr. Trump told The New York Times that because there was a soaring pink marble atrium and 19 commercial floors at the bottom, he decided to list the first residential floor as the 30th floor. Then he decided to call the building’s pinnacle, which is not an actual “floor”, that became the 68^th floor.  That is what appears in all the marketing materials, in online search results and in any news articles to this day.

As to the regulations issues, Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute crunched the numbers and concluded that after Trump’s first year, the administration had taken 62 deregulatory actions and 15 regulatory actions, for a ratio of 4 to 1. In a recent update, accounting for information contained in the Office of Management and Budget’s Spring Agenda, Crews updated the list to a total of 149 deregulatory actions to 29 regulatory actions, for ratio of nearly 5 to 1.

Here’s the problem with Trump’s fuzzy math: “Virtually all of these steps are not considered “economically significant,” meaning it would have to have an annual impact of $100 million or more. That’s an important caveat,” Crews said.

Under the administration’s regulatory agenda, the OMB website shows 498 pending actions are listed as deregulatory and 133 as regulatory, as defined by the executive order. That’s a ratio of nearly 4 to 1.

But the numbers shrink dramatically when you only search for “economically significant” actions: 32 deregulatory and 20 regulatory. That’s less than 2 to 1. (There are also 19 major actions labeled only as “other.”)

There is little doubt that Trump is leading an attack on the regulatory state. For conservatives, that is a good news story.

But the administration continues to oversell its achievements with hyped statistics.

As is also usual with Trump, the Fact Checkers have awarded 3 Pinocchio’s to Trump’s 22-1 claim.

Copyright G.Ater  2018