A Trump policy misses his 'forgotten' Americans
Since his early days as a presidential candidate, Donald Trump has made one thing very clear: He doesn't like regulations.
We're going to "get rid of job-killing regulations," he has said. We're going to "cut regulations by 75 percent," he has said, and "get rid of pointless red tape." Etc., etc.
I understand the excitement of his crowds. The business wing of the Grand Old Party always has pushed for less government oversight and more freedom for members of the business class to do whatever they jolly well please to create bigger profits.
No big surprise there. Businesses are in the business of making money.
But whenever I hear President Trump work up crowds at his rallies with attacks against "unnecessary regulations" without going into what he means by "unnecessary," I have to wonder: Why are these people so eager to be ripped off?
After all, what we have not heard a lot about is which regulations are going and what impact their departure will have on real people. But we're finally getting a clearer idea.
Now that President Trump has made Mick Mulvaney acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, while retaining him as director of the administration's Office of Management and Budget, Mulvaney seems to be dismantling the CFPB one brick at a time.
Ideologically, installing Mulvaney in the CFPB amounted to putting a wily fox in charge of a very large henhouse.
The CFPB, you may recall, was created during the Obama administration with the help of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., in response to the global financial crises to protect consumers from malpractice in the financial industry.
As a fiscal hawk Republican House member from South Carolina, Mulvaney called the CFPB, created under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, a "sick, sad joke" and drafted legislation to abolish it.
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