President Barack Obama is making sure that his administration spends its last days in power by piling on more rules and regulations on private industry, and Republicans have failed to push back.
That’s the message from publisher Steve Forbes in a
magazine editorial published on its website.
“The Obama Administration has let it be known that the White House and the regulatory agencies will be issuing a blizzard of new rules and decrees in the waning months of his miserable regime,” Forbes writes. “These will affect overtime, unionization, the environment and finance, among other areas, thereby hobbling enterprise even more.”
Obama’s bureaucrats last year published a record-setting 82,000 pages of rules in the Federal Register. The right-leaning American Action Forum
estimated those regulations cost $197 billion and added 127 million hours of paperwork for private industry.
“Lawlessness has reigned in the issuance of many of these decrees, but the White House remains unbowed, despite occasional setbacks in the courts,” Forbes says. “Even your IRAs aren’t safe, as Washington starts floating the idea that these accounts should be required to hold a certain amount of government bonds. This is another instance of Obama-style socialism: Government control of what you can do with your money is as good as its owning it.”
Forbes recommends that Republicans remind themselves of the perils of big government by looking up
Ronald Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” speech from Oct. 27, 1964, in support of Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater.
“This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves,” Reagan said. “No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. So governments' programs, once launched, never disappear.”
Forbes says the Obama administration’s attempts to stop corporate tax inversions is illegal without Congressional approval. An inversion happens when a U.S. company buys a foreign firm and adopts a foreign jurisdiction as its headquarters. The new company pays taxes on its U.S. profits, but the Internal Revenue Service faces more obstacles in placing levies on earnings that have been taxed by foreign governments.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Obama’s tax inversion plan is backfiring as foreign companies buy U.S. companies at a record pace.
“The policy won’t generate the revenue that Mr. Obama wants to collect, but it is succeeding in moving control of U.S. businesses offshore,”
the newspapers says in an op-ed. “Is this system good for anyone other than M&A bankers and lawyers—and their overseas clients who gain an advantage in bidding for U.S. assets?”
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