A new report shows Americans are divided on whether government regulation has gone too far.
A new Pew study suggests Americans are divided on the government's regulatory responsibilities. (GETTY IMAGES)
Amid President Donald Trump's continued calls to reduce America's regulatory burden, a new survey from the Pew Research Center shows Americans are broadly split on how they feel about government oversight of the private sector.
Pew's report, published Thursday, shows that less than half of Americans – 42 percent – believe the government has "gone too far regulating financial institutions" and is inherently "making it harder for the economy to grow."
But a slightly greater percentage – 49 percent – believe the government "has not gone far enough in regulating financial institutions and markets, leaving the country at risk of another financial crisis."
"As Donald Trump and congressional Republicans take steps to roll back Obama-era financial regulations, the public remains divided over whether regulations of financial institutions have gone too far or not gone far enough," Samantha Smith, a Pew research assistant, wrote in a post accompanying the survey results. "By roughly 2-to-1, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are more likely to say financial regulations have gone too far (63 percent) than to say they have not gone far enough (31 percent)."
Those statistics are essentially reversed when it comes to Democrats. Sixty-two percent of those who lean left say the government hasn't gone far enough in regulating the private sector, while only 29 percent believe it has overreached.
Notably, Smith wrote that "these views are largely unchanged over the past several years," implying they do not appear to have been influenced by the results of November's presidential election.
The Pew results come only two days after Trump, during a speech before a joint session of Congress, lauded what he called his administration's "historic effort to massively reduce job-crushing regulations."
That effort, as Trump said, has included executive orders and legislation aimed at "creating a deregulation task force inside of every government agency," requiring "that for every one new regulation, two old regulations must be eliminated" and stopping "regulations that threaten the future and livelihood of our great coal miners."
Trump has long derided America's regulatory environment, particularly rules set up in the aftermath of the financial crisis through the Dodd-Frank Act. Many Republican lawmakers, likewise, have set their sights on a regulatory rollback, with Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas pushing legislation that would, among other things, limit government oversight of certain types of banking and financial institutions while curbing the operations of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal ReseThe Devil in the Infrastructure Details
The Pew study, however, is one of a growing pool of public polls supporting the idea that a significant chunk of Americans opposes such a deregulatory agenda. A Rasmussen Reports poll from last month, for example, found that only 36 percent of likely U.S. voters support Trump's one-in, two-out regulatory idea.
A separate February poll from Quinnipiac University found that only 37 percent of Americans said increased regulation hurts the economy, while 50 percent supported more government regulation of financial institutions. In particular, more than three-fifths of respondents opposed peeling back regulations "intended to combat climate change," according to the survey.
Pew's report offers an age and demographic breakdown detailing precisely how certain subgroups of the American public feel about regulatory reform. More than half of those between the ages of 18 and 29, for instance, said they believe the government hasn't gone far enough in regulating financial institutions, while only 33 percent said it has gone too far.
That's compared with only 40 percent of those older than 65 who believe government oversight has been insufficient and 46 percent who believe regulators have gone too far.
Those with a college degree, meanwhile, are significantly more likely to say the government hasn't taken enough action to protect consumers when compared with those who earned a high school diploma or less.
