12-5-24 - 8am - We Need Less Regulation

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, Mike electrical contractor. Here, just chiming in on your
overregulation conversation. I'm no longer able to install outlets on
the side of kitchen islands because kids can tug on
the cord and pull a hot crop pot on top
of themselves that way. So obviously the answer is not

(00:21):
better parenting. It is coming into your home and taking
outlets out of your kitchen island.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Oh my god, seriously makes complete sense to me.

Speaker 3 (00:32):
The very first thing I thought of is not on
our island, but on our countertops, on the countertop on
the it's l shaped on the side that is facing
where the kitchen table is not the dining room with
the kitchen table, is an allt right there where Tamra

(00:53):
usually charges her her iPhone or tablet or something. She'll
charge it there. But that's such a convenient outlet for
many things, like when we're we've got something and she
wants to keep it warm, and she can plug it
in right there next to the table, so we don't
have to walk, you know, the extra six steps into
the kitchen. But come on, if it saves one child

(01:15):
from being born.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
I do have to make some slight corrections, and I
do appreciate everybody who texted in and gave a talkback
about the percentage of the eighty five to seventy million children.
That is eighty five children over the course of nearly
twenty years, and there's an average population of roughly seventy
million children per year. So that eighty five into seventy

(01:43):
million number of the point zero zero zero, zero zero
one to two percent is slightly askew because it's seventy
five million a year and it's not eighty five a
year a.

Speaker 3 (01:56):
Year, eighty five over there twenty years years.

Speaker 4 (01:59):
So it's so the number per year was four yeah,
or four and a half, four and a half yeah,
So that would be the new percentage at four into
seventy million.

Speaker 3 (02:17):
Before I go into the Loper case, whatever Dragon just
said made me stop and think about the whole idea
about TSA and risk taking. You know, we we learned
from the hijackings in the sixties and seventies that they

(02:39):
wanted cash and for whatever stupid reason, they wanted to
go I never understood this. They wanted to go to Havana. Now,
I guess they thought they could go to Havana, Cuba,
Cuba because maybe we didn't have an extradition treaty or something.
I don't know. I'm just saying I'm trying to imagine why,

(02:59):
because Fidel would just confiscate the cash and then you'd be,
you know, broke and stuck in a vana. We learned that.
We didn't do much about it, but we learned that's
what the endgame was. On nine to eleven, we learned
what the million game was, and that was to crash

(03:22):
the planes into buildings. So we did the one thing
that reduced the overall risk that had zero impact on
you as a passenger, no impact on you whatsoever, ceiling

(03:46):
the cockpit doors. Now, a hijacker could still put a
box cutter or an ink pen or a knife for
something else to a flight attendant or a passenger throat,
and they can still kill a passenger, but they were
going to get access to the plane, and so one

(04:07):
person or maybe the entire plane might you know, give
up their lives. But even that was unlikely to occur
because now we as passengers knew what the end game was.
So we as passengers, if you know, now, before someone
attacks a flight attendant, well today we might just get

(04:30):
out our phones. Oh, look flight attendants having their throat slash. Oh,
let me get a videos like but on my Instagram.
Think of the new followers. I'll get that exactly, I'll
get that. In fact, I might even get asked. Somebody
might ask to use that and I can sell it
to CBS. Oh my god. We are such a horrible country,
horrible in the way we do things. But instead of

(04:53):
just ceiling the cockpit doors, which would have minimal if
no impact on passengers, instead, because I was in the
whole chain of conversation with this about about it the
other day with someone, we instead took and created, against

(05:16):
objections of many people within the administration of creating the
Transportation Security Administration at the time that they took on
board the box cutters, there wasn't necessarily you know something
that you know, or knitting needles, which are just as dangerous,

(05:38):
or my mont Blanc fountain pen just as dangerous. We
instead substituted government employees for private sector security personnel that
were hired and paid for by the airlines that had
the most vested interest in making sure that their planes

(06:01):
were safe. The airports don't care. All the airports care
about is that the airlines fly and lease landing slots
at your airport so you can make money, so the
passengers come through, so you make money off the concessionaires,
so you can make money off the landing fees and

(06:21):
the sale of jet fuel and everything else that you know. No,
we didn't do that. We took away the one place,
the one entity, the airlines as a whole, who had
a vested interest in making sure their planes were safe,
and instead turned it over to the government. What vested
interest does the what vested interest does the TSA have?

(06:47):
Next time you go to the airport, look closely, watch
the individuals and think to yourself, what do they really
care about? Now that's not to detigrate every single TSA employee,
but ninety nine percent of them because they're they're They're

(07:08):
just there to do a job.

Speaker 4 (07:09):
Man.

Speaker 3 (07:09):
You know, I've been taught how to look for explosives. Yeah,
I've been taught how to look for, you know, a
sharp object. I've been taught, you know, how to kind
of measure three ounces. Make sure you don't take more
than three ounces of shampoo on the plane. It's absurd
what we do. And that's an example of you know,
and in fact, I remember when we were briefed about

(07:34):
the underwear bomber and the shoe bomber, and that led
to the whole discussion about the three ounces. And then
of course, not just me, but others were like, but
even with a three ounce limit, you could still have

(07:57):
the same number of hijackerscon three ounces or less of
whatever it is, because we don't know. Do they know
what is in your shampoo bottle when it goes through
the X ray? No, they don't. It doesn't measure the
density of the liquid, the specific weight of the liquid.

(08:18):
It doesn't do any of that. So whatever compounds you
need to make an explosive, if you need twelve ounces,
you need four, You need four hijackers, and four hijackers
are more than willing to give up their lives because
they want the They want a dozen virgins, you know,
before they go see Allah. So that's a stupid rule,

(08:44):
but boy, it makes everybody feel safe, doesn't it. And
now it's gotten to the point where I would venture
to say that most young people who weren't around on
nine to eleven who now go through airport just assume
that there's some logical rational basis for doing it. And
even if there's not a logical rational basis for doing it. Oh,

(09:06):
this is all done to keep me safe, so it's okay.
This is the kind of of over time when you
think about public education, higher education, DEI, critical race theory,
the lack of understanding about risk analysis, all of that

(09:27):
leads to where we are today. And that's why the
Chevron deference rule that said, hey, if a statue, you know,
first think about the court. The Supreme Court's job is
to interpret statues, is to read the Constitution, read statues,
interpret those. But in Chevron, the court said, yeah, well,

(09:49):
if the law's ambiguous, we'll just defer to the regulators
as long as it's reasonable. Well, I can make almost
anything sound reasonable. And in a court whose docket is
piled and piled with really important issues, if you've got
some esultaric regulatory issue, you're going to defer to the

(10:12):
regulators until you get enough constitutional scholars on the court
to say, wait a minute. Our job is to interpret statutes,
is to interpret the law, and to give this blanket
deference to the regulators to the administrative state is unconstitutional

(10:34):
because Congress has abdicated their constitutional responsibility under Article one
to legislate the pass laws, not the administrative state. So
when the case is Loper Bright Enterprises versus Romando, that
got rid of the Chevron precedent. And it was in

(10:56):
that case that the court recognized the stupidity of just
blindly allowing bureaucrats whose interpretations often expand their own power
at the expense of both the legislature and you and
ize individuals. That represents a vital course correction, an opportunity
to strip away layers of sssive regulations and restore at

(11:18):
least some balance of power between the branches of government. Now,
the concern I have is when the Trump administration starts
to use Loper and they start just whacking off regulations.

(11:42):
In fact, if I were Trump, I would come in
and just say, you know, any regulation passed. You know,
he in his first term he had a rule that
said for every new regulation you passed, you got to
get rid of ten regulations or two or whatever the
number was. I think you got to just come in
and just say every regulation passed over the past four years,
just rescind, just order all of those regulations rescinded. Easy fix,

(12:11):
Difficult to implement because many of the regulations that we
get are designed by lobbyists representing special interests. Whether those
be grudge door manufacturers or grudge door opener manufacturers, or
automobile manufacturers or toothbrush manufacturers, it doesn't make any difference.

(12:32):
Lobbyists want regulations. Businesses want regulations because it allows them
to protect their turf and allows them to stifle competition
and innovation. Trump should seize the opportunity to sign in
an executive order requiring every federal agency to proactively review

(12:56):
every single regulation in their portfolio, not just manage the regulations,
but to eliminate those that were never meant to exist
in the first place. Every regulation or rule there wasn't
explicitly specifically legislated by Congress ought to be removed. And
if that creates a problem for Congress, then force Congress

(13:19):
to do their effing job and pass a law and
let that stand the scrutiny of the voters. If you're
upset with a regulation, who do you go to? Oh,
you can go to your congressman. You can bitch about
a regulation, and I can guarant damn tee what the
entry's going to be well in that law, because we

(13:40):
don't have the expertise we told the regulators to design
the regulation because we wanted the regulation to be, you know,
to really be a good regulation. I'm getting I truly
am getting radicalized about regulations. We're so overregulated. And if

(14:01):
you get you know, if you get beat up every
single day, at some point you just you accept the beatings.
I read about a recent story about Uh. I can't
remember his first name, Lee Lai is his last name.
He's the founder of of of of Apple News.

Speaker 5 (14:24):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (14:24):
The I think it's Apple News that anyway, that from
Hong Kong, the Hong Kong entrepreneur, the billionaire who is
now in solitary confined confinement in a Chinese prison for
daring to write about things about how you know, China
violated all the entire agreement turning Hong Kong over to

(14:47):
the Chinese Communist Party from the Brits, which was a
huge mistake to begin with, but they they did it.
His whole added to is every aspect of his life
in that solitary communist prison is regulated, is controlled. And

(15:12):
the story was about and I forget who the person
is that he's corresponding with. It was only important in
my mind because it's a conservative in this country. Who
is really trying to correspond with him and keep his
spirits up and everything. I wish I could get an

(15:33):
address for him, because I would write him a letter,
probably put me on the radar of the Chinese Communist Party.
But who gives a rat task. The point of his
story is you get beat up so much that in
your mind you just learn to accept it. I think this.

(15:58):
We're prisoners. We're prisoners of the administrative state, and we've
now been conditioned and brainwashed, conditioned and brainwashed to just
accept these regulations because, oh, Michael, will save a life,
you know, to keep a kid from getting hurt. Well,
if there are six hundred kids injured on bicycles every

(16:21):
single day in this country, all we need is going
back to that lin Ball field we talked about yesterday.
We just need a focal point. We need a child
really seriously injured. You're like blood and guts on the
street in a bicycle accident. And I guarante an tee
you that the Consumer Product Safety Commission or some organization,

(16:45):
some bureaucraft will come up a regulation and I say,
stuff's just band the bikes, now.

Speaker 5 (16:52):
Michael, thatman is correct. We had to put a pop
up outlet in the nine foot because we couldn't put
them on the side, which was an additional costs, probably
safety reasons. Have a great day.

Speaker 3 (17:09):
And somebody on the text line said, if we can't
have outlets on the islands because a kid might grab
the cord and pull the crock pot over, then why
don't we require all wall outlets to be at least
he said five feet tall? But because kids are stupid
when they're teenagers, I think they ought to be at

(17:30):
least eight or ten feet high. But then you'd have
to climb up on the ladder to get onto, and
ladders are dangerous. You ever looked at the warning sign
on the ladder? Go to home depot or lows or
I don't care where wherever letters are sold and look
at the warning sign on the ladders.

Speaker 2 (17:52):
I had no idea what to pop up outlet was
until just now, so I looked it up. They are
a couple hundred bucks a pee.

Speaker 3 (18:01):
Oh that's probably all you have? What are what? What
are they? What's a pop up?

Speaker 2 (18:06):
It literally is you you push down and it pops
up out of the out of the countertop, or it
rotates from a little bit. What we have in the
the the sales side. Those those desks, it's similar to that,
and those are a hundred bucks, the one that actually
pops up out of the countertop so you employ.

Speaker 3 (18:27):
So how dangerous is an outlet on a pop up
outlet on the countertop where you're likely to spill a liquid?

Speaker 4 (18:35):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (18:41):
Uh huh. Somebody text and said sounds like rage against
the machine day and I would say, oh, yeah, it's
a day ending and why there. Nah, I'm not gonna
down that rabbit. Never so let's go by the loper
for a moment that overturned Chevron. So, as I said,

(19:07):
Trump ought to conduct a comprehensive review of every existing
regulation and the mandate that he should send down to
the bureaucracy.

Speaker 5 (19:21):
And.

Speaker 3 (19:23):
They need to develop. So when I was the undersecretary,
one of the things that drove me nuts was that
after a disaster there was always these action after action reports.
Everybody has to do it. You know, if you're in
the military, you know the same thing. There's always an
after action report. But what drove me nuts was there

(19:44):
was no way for me to track whether or not
if we needed a regulatory change, a policy change, a
statutory change, whatever change it might be to make certain
that whatever mistake we made or whatever lesson we learned
that we implemented in the next disaster. There was no

(20:05):
way institutionally for us to track that, so is the Undersecretary,
I had no way are we implementing the lessons learned
from the previous experiences. So I went to the RAND
Corporation and I said, look, I here's a lesson that

(20:25):
you need to understand too. Why did I go to
the Rand Corporation? Well, I could have gone to Booz
Allen or anybody else, but they would have charged, you know,
humongous amount of money. So I went to RAND, which
is kind of a government private public sector group. They
do some good work. They do a lot of bad work.

(20:46):
They do good work too, but they had particular expertise
and what I was looking for and that was some
sort of mechanism by which I could track after action
reports to see that, you know, some sort of metrics
by which I could measure are we actually implementing the

(21:08):
change that we learned from the after action report. So
I got that, and you know, I spent you know,
I spent some of your tax dollars to do that.
Got it in place, and the bureaucrats hated it because
now the boss was actually tracking to see if the

(21:30):
after action reports, which sometimes were just bs, but there
were often kernels of really good stuff in there, were
we actually making the changes that needed to be changed.
And they hated that because that meant they might have
to change the way they do business. Well, then what
the and after action report if you're not going to

(21:51):
learn from and actually implement it. Well, I've since learned
that not my first success or maybe my second successor
scrapped it because he got such pushback from the bureaucracy.
So Trump's going to have to really drill down, and

(22:16):
it's going to take more than just an undersecretary or
an assistant secretary in these departments. What I needed was
I needed political appointees in the program offices, political appointees
that were loyal to me and what my agenda was

(22:36):
that could force at the program level that kind of change. Well,
Trump's going to have to do the same thing because
otherwise he's going to run into the same problems that
I ran into. So if they do that, if they
go back and start really looking at existing regulations, you know,

(22:57):
prioritize them first, look at those that have been subject
to litigation, those that you know, citizens have challenged in court,
but where the agency prevailed solely because of Chevron, Well,
get rid of those regulations. You know what that would do.
That would ensure that the regulations that are most obviously

(23:17):
in conflict with statutory authority are removed first, and those
are probably the ones that burden American family, small businesses,
and industries the most. Now he's gonna fight to the
point of the talk back in some of the text messages.
You're gonna have to fight the lobbyists too, because remember,
many of these regulations are proposed by lobbyists because they

(23:40):
work to the advantage of the interests that they represent.
I know it sounds like Debbie Downer, but what Trump's
proposing to do, if he's able to accomplish, is gonna
be earth shattering. But making it earth shattering is gonna
have to really take effort. So take there's a case

(24:07):
National Cable and Telecommunications Association. Now just stop right there.
That's the plaintiff. The National Cable and Telecommunications Association is
a trade organization that represents what the telecommon cable industry.
It was National Cable and Telecommunications Association versus Brand X

(24:31):
or EPA versus EME E Homer City Generation. In those
two examples, the agencies one in court not because Congress
granted the power that those agencies exercise, but because the
Chevron deference gave them the benefit of the doubt. Well,

(24:52):
take those regulations back, return it to the American people.
Here's the example. In the Brand X case, the CCS
classification of broadband services as information services rather than telecom
services created an entirely new regulatory environment. And what did
that do? That benefited major ISPs internet service providers at

(25:18):
the expense of competition and consumer choice. In other words,
it's a great example of how Chevron deference a lot
of regulation that was never intended by Congress to get enacted.
The Court looked at it and said, well, we defer
to you know, because of Chevron, will defer to the industry.
And what did it do. It benefited the lobbyists that

(25:39):
were representing like the National Cable and Telecommunications Association and
all of their members, and it reduced competition, reduced your choices,
and made it more expensive for competitors to enter that arena.
Those regulations should have never had a legislative mandate, and

(26:00):
they ought to be high on the chopping block. And
it's a great example of how you and Trump obviously
won't do this himself, but his omb director could do this,
and he's precisely the kind of person that could do this,
but he'll need Trump to appoint as deep into the

(26:23):
bureaucracy as he can, in fact, use that schedule f
idea of getting rid of being able to put political
appointees at lower levels than they normally are. You know,
most political appointees are the secretaries, the deputy secretaries, the undersecretaries,

(26:44):
and then all the hundreds and thousands of assistant secretaries,
well those of us who are under secretaries, not many
of us, so we're pretty limited in what we can do.
But you get a bunch of assistant secretaries or whatever
you want to call them, assistant assistant secretaries, and you
get them in the bowels of the bureaucracy, they can

(27:06):
really start to slash those those regulations. But then there's
a second category, and those are regulations that have high
costs attached to them. There are studies out there that
show that, and this is the topic I keep trying

(27:28):
to get to, is that overregulation stifles economic growth. Over
regulation restricts job creation, and most often that affects small
business more than it does big business. Because what does
big business have. Well, they've got teams and reams of lawyers,

(27:50):
they got all sorts of financial resources, they get all
sorts of consultants. But if you run a small company,
you're just at the whim of the if you try
to challenge them to squish you like a bug. So well,
let me give you an example. When I talk about

(28:13):
costly regulations, do you know that those regulations are estimated
to cost American businesses and families about two trillion dollars
in compliance costs every single year. There's two trillion dollars
that could be spent on capital improvements, hiring more people,

(28:38):
creating R and D departments that could come up with
a better mousetrap for whatever your mousetrap is. But that's
two trillion dollars that's only spent on compliance, nothing about innovation,
nothing about improving a product or a service, or expanding

(28:58):
your business. In that's two trillion dollars that goes down
a black hole of compliance. If Trump focuses on that,
think about what that does to the economy. So and
I hate the fact that the statistic is two trillion
dollars because that focuses on or makes people think about

(29:21):
doze and reducing the deficit by our budgets government spending
by two trillion dollars. That's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about two trillion dollars that comes out of
the pocket of small business owners and large businesses. But
two trillion dollars that comes out of the private sector
gets sucked up into compliance, and that's two trillion dollars

(29:44):
that if we got rid of those regulations, that's two
trillion dollars that comes right back into the economy that
seeks at productive us, more jobs, more innovation, more technological
advance since, more capital improvements, and more breaks.

Speaker 6 (30:04):
Sometimes I had a problem with parking by eighteen wheeler
and a lot which I kept all the weeds down
in and I started researching the laws. It's incredible, but
you're right if they want you. You've broken many laws.

Speaker 3 (30:22):
There's laws all over.

Speaker 6 (30:24):
One law in the city of Redlands, California, is you
cannot park your vehicle between eleven am and six pm
on the street.

Speaker 3 (30:38):
Let me see if I can find real quickly, hang on,
I know it's silence. See if I can find the book.
I'll look for the book in the minute, because again

(30:59):
I don't know if I still have my copy or not.
All I have to look today. But you do get
three felon these a day, or two felon these a day. Whatever.
The title of the book was. The text messages I'm
glad you guys, Not that I don't think you don't

(31:20):
always get it, but it's this is a difficult subject
to address because and I would ask you to really
stop and think about yourself because again, as I always say,
I'm not an anarchist, but where do you draw the line?

(31:44):
Seriously think about the garage door openers. So and again
I don't know whether the death or injury of a
child is what prompted the innovation of a garage door
opener censor, or whether that was something that in terms

(32:06):
of innovation and marketing the garage door opening opener companies
themselves did coming up with a better mouse trap. But
the justification now is that we had eighty five kids
over a ten year period when there was an average
of seventy million kids every year during that ten year period.

(32:27):
We had eighty five. So an average of what is
that driving eight a year, they were injured or killed
eight And that's costing us. Not that, but those kinds
of regulations are costing two trillion dollars a year and

(32:51):
two trillion dollars a year back into the private sectorary. Remember,
like water seeks its lowest point, money seeks its best
and highest value, its best and highest use. Money wants
to be used, It wants to grow. It's the very
nature of capitalism. Two trillion dollars, a true trillion dollar

(33:13):
infusion into into the economy would be almost as good
or as good as a two trillion dollar tax cut.
Just boom. People now have money to spend on things
that are productive as opposed to things that are not productive.
But too many people just succumb to the regulatory scheme

(33:35):
because it'll save one life