For realizing that the only way we're going to get out of debt is to cut spending.
As for regulations to repeal, where to begin....
Well, probably the first thing to start with is minimum wage laws, since they cause unemployment (and if you didn't know that, ask for a refund on any economics classes you've taken or books you've bought). In addition, they cause prices on things produced by low wage workers to rise, and since those things tend to be the same things being bought by low wage workers, that little bit of extra money they make ends up not going as far. So, that's a definite first thing to be repealed.
Drug laws are another obvious one. In the 65 or so years that marijuana has been illegal, marijuana use has gone up to many times what it was when marijuana was legal. In the meantime, government agencies have spent more than a trillion dollars trying to stop marijuana use, ruined millions of people's lives by throwing them in jail, and caused America to have the highest percent of its population in prison of any country in the world (higher even than Communist China). In the process, they've turned marijuana from a legal, commercial drug to an illegal, black market drug, giving organized crime a cash crop worth over twenty million dollars worth of business a day. Giving those millions of dollars worth of business to farmers and pharmacies, instead of drug dealers and crime rings, is a hell of a start.
With the environment, I'll grant you more regulations in certain areas for less in others. Before I get started explaining what changes I want to see here, it's important to know who's doing the most polluting. The nation's number one polluter, who has dumped sewage into national parks, leaked radioactive waste into drinking water, and contaminated over 60,000 sites in the US, has been getting away with it. The cost of cleaning up the pollution caused by the nation's number one polluter is about five times as high as the cost of cleaning up the pollution caused by all American corporations combined (obviously, the nation's number one polluter is not, as most environmentalists would have you believe, a corporation). In fact, government-caused pollution is so out of hand that the EPA itself is responsible for pollution - EPA laboratories were found leaking mercury into drinking water.
You can see the article by going to
http://www.boston.com and typing "worst polluter in the land" into their search engine (should be the only article, from 1999, if you type it right), or just type "Boston Globe, license to pollute, worst polluter in the land" into google to find a half dozen other articles that quote and expand on that one.
That said, it's obvious that the first thing we need to do is to make the government liable for its own pollution (which is kinda tricky; some of the articles that reference the Boston Globe one offer further explanation on that point).
In addition, the policies we do have to restrict pollution are extremely hypocritical. The government grants pollution "credits" to corporations, saying that all pollution up to a certain point is fine and dandy, but anything past that point is illegal. The credits are transferable, and companies regularly buy and sell credits from each other based on how much polluting they do. That they're transferable isn't the problem - in fact, since it means that companies that pollute more end up paying more money and companies that pollute less make more money, that's the best part of the plan. The problems are that a certain level of pollution is free, and that businesses can't go past a certain level if the need for production arises.
So, the answer is pretty clear: make all credits purchasable. The price should be slightly higher than the cost of cleaning up the pollution (that way, companies pay directly to clean up any pollution they cause). Companies would then be able to produce as much as they wanted, as long as they were willing to pay to clean up every ounce of pollution they cause in the process. It also encourages companies to reduce pollution levels in the first place, as preventing pollution is generally cheaper than cleaning it up afterwards.
A few other examples that I remember from a speech by Mary Ruwart (author of "Healing our World):
In New York, a sisterhood of nuns attempted to set up a homeless shelter a few years ago. After spending money on the land and building materials, government inspectors looked over their plans and forced them to abandon the project because they wouldn't include an elevator in the building (they couldn't afford to). So, rather than having one more homeless shelter where disabled people would only be able to access the first floor, that homeless shelter isn't there and isn't doing any homeless people any good, disabled or not. That type of regulation should go.
There was a case, I think it was in Chicago but I don't remember off the top of my head, where a homeless man was shining shoes for money. He couldn't afford a business license, and the police arrested him, confiscated what little money he had made shining shoes, and fined him for operating a business without a license (no, they didn't jail him, so he's still homeless, but a lot poorer). These kinds of "anti-business" restrictions hardly slow down the multinational corporations they're intended to regulate, since those companies can afford to hire lawyers to get them out of any messes they get into. Instead, they generally hurt small business, start up businesses, and people trying to work from home or on the street.
Need more examples? I can find more.
