No. of Recommendations: 6
I could go on, but you get the drift. Short term, probably not a lot of gigantic change with either candidate. Longer term, probably massive if Trump is elected. Then again, I remember “infrastructure week” as a running joke for nearly 4 years, so all the hyperbolic talk might come to nothing, we’d just have to endure the unendurable for 1400-some-odd days.
I think that there won't be a lot of gigantic change with either candidate on most economic regulatory and federal budget matters....either long or short term. The President just doesn't control that much.
Take, for example, the idea of cutting the budget by 30%. That can't happen no matter what the Executive wants. Total non-defense, non-discretionary spending is only about 14% of the budget. Even if Trump tries to fiddle around with impoundment, he's not going to do it for defense and he can't do it for the non-discretionary stuff (like paying social security or interest on the debt). And Trump probably doesn't want to cut spending for budgetary reasons - he might want to cut very specific programs in order to get a political effect, but he's not a "let's cut spending" politician.
Even if he did, he needs Congressional approval. He'll never get it. Regardless of whether the Democrats get the House or not, the GOP is unlikely to get enough of a majority to make things like entitlement reform possible. He could probably get some of his tax cuts through a reconciliation bill, but nothing "gigantic" in terms of effect on the economy. He has more unilateral control over tariffs, but since goods imports are only about 11% of GDP, and since Trump isn't going to want to suffer the inflation/economic pain that comes with increasing import duties on things like oil and manufacturing equipment by a large number, he's going to probably just target stuff.
As for specific companies and industries, well I’d look to “news”, “late night talk shows”, Amazon, Google, and others to be in the center of the target, and Tesla to walk off with some sort of wonderful prize for the boy genius’ efforts. There are others, maybe they’ll come up later in the thread.
Trump's not famous for rewarding the people who help him, so I don't know if Tesla gets a wonderful prize or not. But I think Musk would be happy if he just got a compliant NHTSA to let him operate FSD/driverless cars. Probably the one existential piece of regulatory risk Tesla faces is a determination that driverless cars have to have redundant sensing - that they need both vision and LIDAR/radar. If there's a rational business explanation for Musk's turn towards Trump - rather than milquetoast supporting both sides since he wants to do business with the government no matter who wins - it would be that.
