Jared Kushner: evaluation

Transcript context

…Is that one of the main problems here? So you also mentioned the book, the Great Degeneration by Niall Ferguson, an awesome historian. He’s been on this podcast. It helped you understand the inefficiencies of government regulation. I’d love it if you can give an insight into why government is so inefficient at times. When it is inefficient, when it doesn’t work, why is that the case? The bureaucracy that you spoke to, the negative aspects of the bureaucracy. So we don’t have enough time on this podcast to go into it, but it’s… Look, there’s a lot of aspects that work as well. But I do think we’ve gotten too big. Niall’s book that you mentioned, one of the things that I took from that, I read it I think in 2012, right kind of in the middle of the Great Financial Crisis, was he was talking about how government regulation often was put in place to deal with old crises. It was never going to solve future problems, it was more to solve for problems that had happened in the past. And I remember thinking about that. One thing I was very proud of, of the work of the Trump administration was that you had four years consecutively where there was a net decrease in the cost of regulations. So to give you a context, in the last year of Obama in 2016, there was 6 million man hours spent by the private sector complying with new federal regulations. And that’s not really what the intent of our government was, right? If we have rules or regulations, those should be legislated by Congress. They shouldn’t be put in by bureaucrats who are basically saying, “I want to follow this objective,” so using the power of the pen in order to do that. So the deregulatory effort was actually very critical to Trump’s economic success that happened in the beginning of the administration. And then what I saw with regulation was anytime either there was legislation or regulation coming, the people pushing for it were usually the people who would benefit from the regulatory captures. You look at the Great Financial Crisis, where you had these big banking reforms. Well, what happened during the big banking reforms? Then you had a big reduction in the amount of banks that occurred, and the big banks became even bigger. Whereas I don’t think that was the intention of the legislation, but the people who were writing the legislation and influencing it had a lot of the constituencies from those larger institutions. And then what happened as a result of that? A lot of these smaller institutions didn’t have the ability to be as competitive. They had more restrictions, more costs, they became less profitable. But these were the banks that were serving small business, which is the biggest creator of jobs in our country. And then as a result, the bigger banks got more powerful and what happened in the country as a result of the regulations that they put in place? The wealth gap in the country grew, it didn’t shrink. And so, I think oftentimes what they say these regulations are intended to be, the result often becomes the opposite. And so, what President Trump did and his administration was they did a massive deregulatory effort. And I think they pledged that for every one regulation they put on, because you do need some regulation in an economy and in a society, they would take off two. And in the first year, they eliminated eight regulations for every one. r every one regulation they put on, because you do need some regulation in an economy and in a society, they would take off two. And in the first year, they eliminated eight regulations for every one. So that was just something I took from it, which was, I thought, very interesting. And you had to really, I think you just have to think through what are the consequences going to be of the different actions you take? And often, government gets it wrong by taking an action that feels right, but has big negative consequences down the road.…

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