Richard Salsman, who writes the Capitalist Advisor newsletter, has chronicled what he calls “the rampant growth of regulation” over the past hundred years.

The chart below shows the explosion of what has become a $2.5 trillion annual tax on our private economy. Every president since the late 1960s has enacted major new regulatory costs with the exception of Reagan and Trump.

The decades when new regulatory agencies  were added were the 1930s and the 1970s. What a shock that those were the decades with the most economic turmoil.

Trump’s pace of deregulation so far in the first six months of his second term could surpass Reagan’s record. The recent repeal of the absurd greenhouse gas endangerment finding that labeled CO2 a pollutant, could alone erase hundreds of billions in unnecessary costs.