President Trump channeled his successful developer days today, as he cut a ceremonial red ribbon to celebrate massive government regulation rollbacks, the likes of which we haven’t seen for decades…

WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Thursday that his administration was answering “a call to action” by rolling back regulations on environmental protections, health care, financial services and other industries as he made a push to showcase his accomplishments near the end of his first year in office.

The remarks highlighted an area where Mr. Trump has perhaps done more to change the policies of his predecessor than any other, with regulatory shifts that have affected wide sections of the economy.

“We are just getting started,” Mr. Trump said, speaking from the Roosevelt Room of the White House. He described progress so far as the “most far-reaching regulatory reform” in United States history, a claim he did not back up.

 

https://www.instagram.com/p/BcskQOLgSBp/

Echoing his days as a real estate developer with the flair of a groundbreaking, Mr. Trump used an oversized pair of scissors to cut a ribbon his staff had set up in front of two piles of paper, representing government regulations in 1960 (20,000 pages, he said), and today — a pile that was about six feet tall (said to be 185,000 pages).

His efforts — his staff said that the rules already rolled back had saved $8.1 billion in regulatory costs over their lifetime, or a total of an estimated $570 million a year — have brought cheers from the business community, most notably from companies that will benefit from the rollbacks.

Several economic indicators — and comments from companies large and small — suggest that a shift in federal regulatory policy is building business confidence and accelerating economic growth, developments Mr. Trump certainly took credit for on Thursday.

A survey of chief executives released this month by the Business Roundtable found that, for the first time in six years, executives did not cite regulation as the top cost pressure facing their companies.

“C.E.O.s appear to be responding to the administration’s energetic focus on regulation,” Joshua Bolten, the roundtable’s president, said this month. – New York Times