Our main topic today revolves around the reactions President Trump got from the CEOs of some of America’s largest corporations in meetings he had with them this week.
Mr. Trump advised these corporate bigwigs of two things: 1) that he was willing to offer them very attractive corporate income tax cuts and significant reductions in onerous federal regulations; and 2) a warning that if they moved manufacturing outside the US, they would face stiff tariffs on any goods or services they tried to import back into America.
Among the two benefits Trump offered them – significantly lower corporate income taxes and a rollback in onerous regulations – you may be very surprised at which one the corporate CEOs preferred. Here are the details.
President Donald Trump met with a dozen major American manufacturers at the White House on Monday, pledging to slash regulations and cut corporate taxes. The CEOs included Ford, Dell, Dow Chemical, Lockheed, Johnson & Johnson, Tesla, Space X and others.
The new president told the CEOs that he would like to cut corporate taxes to the 15%-20% range, down from the current statutory level of 35% — a pledge that will require cooperation from the Republican-led Congress.
Trump also emphasized that he is seriously committed to reducing regulations which increase costs and limit jobs. Apparently one of the CEOs asked Trump for some details on his deregulation plans, and all of the CEOs were stunned by his response. Trump said:
“We think we can cut regulations by 75 percent, maybe more.”
Unfortunately, the president didn’t elaborate on what that meant. Obviously, he didn’t mean 75% of all regulations – that would be impossible and dangerous. What I suspect he meant was 75% of the onerous regulations put in place by former-President Obama. The president added:
“We’re gonna be cutting regulation massively. The problem with the regulation
we have right now is that you can’t do anything. You can’t. I have people tell
me they have more people working on regulations than they have doing product.”
While the president didn’t clarify what he meant with the 75% estimate, what I want to bring to your attention is the reaction by the CEOs. Keep in mind that Mr. Trump told the manufacturing CEOs that he is going to slash the corporate income tax and implement major deregulation.
So which would the CEOs prefer? After the meeting Trump said the CEOs told him that if he could only do one or the other, they would much prefer reducing regulations over the tax cut. Wow! That tells us just how bad over-regulation became during Obama’s presidency.
Hopefully, President Trump will be successful in revamping US regulations. Time will tell.
Obama’s 2016 Regulations Broke Record by 13,000+ Pages
President Obama broke all records when it comes to issuing new government regulations last year. Obama’s 2016 Federal Register stood at a record 94,908 pages as of December 23 for a total of 3,756 final rules and regulations, with a week left to go.
Most shocking about Obama’s 2016 Federal Register is that as of December 23, it stood fully 13,000 pages higher than the last all-time record, before the year even ended. And that does not include the flurry of new regulations he rammed through in his last weeks in office in January.
Notice that President Obama holds seven of the last eight records for most federal regulations. And that is only through December 23 last year. While data is not yet available, it is believed that Obama’s final 2016 page count was closer to 100,000 pages!
Unfortunately, some of Obama’s most egregious executive orders and actions will be difficult, if not impossible, for President Trump to reverse with his own executive actions. In one of his last executive orders in office, Obama banned offshore drilling in large areas of the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans permanently.
It is estimated that there are more than 27 billion barrels of oil and 132 trillion cubic feet of natural gas under the Atlantic and Arctic Ocean areas banned by Obama. It remains to be seen if Mr. Trump and/or Congress can reverse this.
While the mainstream media looked the other way at Mr. Obama’s abuses of power, there’s no doubt they’ll have a magnifying glass on every executive action taken by President Trump.
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