Sometimes,
pens and phones are mightier than swords. Having put aside
its legal
qualms, the Obama administration
will move ahead with plans to take unilateral regulatory action
against corporate inversions, seeking to make them more
expensive and more difficult to finagle.
The president explained his decision yesterday in a statement
loaded with enough buzzwords to make even
a climate change activist blush:
We’ve recently seen a few large corporations announce plans to
exploit this loophole, undercutting businesses that act responsibly
and leaving the middle class to pay the bill, and I’m glad that
[Treasury] Secretary [Jack] Lew is exploring additional actions to
help reverse this trend.
The “loophole” allows companies to take shelter overseas from
America’s byzantine
corporate tax structure. Under the current system,
American-domiciled companies are not only taxed at the highest rate
in the world, they also owe Uncle Sam taxes on income earned
outside U.S. territory. American companies can avoid these taxes by
merging—”inverting”—with foreign companies.
But the economics of his proposed solution aside, the proposal
is just the latest in a long Obama administration tradition of
taking unilateral action, often with the briefest perfunctory nod
at Congress: Congress duly passed Obamacare, but the
president’s administration has made a habit of selectively
enforcing provisions and unilaterally changing parts of the
law. The president
dubiously claimed he didn‘t
need congressional approval for military action in
Libya. Obama is also
hoping to bypass Senate approval for a new international
climate change accord.
If Libya wasn’t proof enough of a reversal of Obama’s
2007 position on executive power, he now claims he doesn’t need
approval to attack ISIS in Syria and Iraq. This despite
the patent illegality of the whole affair—John
Yoo notwithstanding. The president has instead been content
with paying
lip-service to congressional approval for military action in
the Middle East, saying that “he would welcome congressional action
that demonstrates a unified front,” but denying he actually needs
it.
And so too with his executive action cracking down on corporate
inversions: “Both Lew and Obama have said that they would prefer to
see Congress take action to prevent inversions, but lawmakers have
been deadlocked.”
President Obama
has claimed that “we are strongest as a nation when the
president and Congress work together.” Yet it is becoming
increasingly clear that Obama thinks the nation strongest when
Congress agrees to whatever he wants. And should there be
disagreement, well, he’ll forge ahead anyway.
from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1vd4SQq
via IFTTT