Posts Tagged ‘Sarbanes-Oxley’

Dan  Riehl

Gingrich Eschews Rhetoric for Substance in CPAC Address

by Dan Riehl

If one was looking for fiery, crowd pleasing, political rhetoric from former Speaker Newt Gingrich as he addressed CPAC today, they were likely disappointed. What Gingrich did do was run through a litany of policy solutions he claimed he has committed to implement immediately upon taking office in January of 2013.

Contrasting an America that can versus an America that can’t, Gingrich compared America’s speed and might in winning WWII versus her current inability to seal its own border. In a lighter moment, the former Speaker contrasted the efficiency of package tracking by Federal Express with the government’s inability to track illegal immigrants, suggesting sending each one a package may be the best way to apprehend the latter.

He also mentioned repealing Obamacare, Dodd Frank, and Sarbanes Oxley on his first day in office. He stated his desire to be a “paycheck president” versus a “food stamp president,” a term he used to denigrate Barack Obama.

Calling for a Fall campaign focused on substance, Gingrich also mentioned eliminating the Capital Gains tax and implementing 100% expensing for all new equipment written off in one year to help get the economy growing. Additionally, he called for a modernization of the workforce, proposing that unemployment compensation be linked to business training programs to avoid paying people for 99 weeks “for doing nothing.” (more…)

Wayne Crews

Runaway Spending and Deficits–Plus Runaway Regulation

by Wayne Crews
Today, the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Commercial and Administrative Law will conduct a hearing on “Cost-Justifying Regulations: Protecting Jobs and the Economy by Presidential and Judicial Review of Costs and Benefits.”

These hearings are long overdue. Runaway regulation is now nipping at the the heels of runaway spending and deficits. The Dodd-Frank financial legislation alone has already, as of April, generated 3.3 million words of regulation in 3,500 Federal Register pages, according to the Wall Street Journal, and the translation of law-to-rules there has barely begun.

A much-cited evaluation of the United States federal regulatory enterprise for the Small Business Administration finds annual regulatory compliance costs hit $1.75 trillion. (Criticisms of this report have emerged; but for starters let’s recognize that estimated costs of Sarbanes-Oxley alone–the post-Enron but pre-Dodd Frank financial law–top $1 trillion.)

The expanding scope of federal regulations is newly explored in the 2011 edition of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State. (The report also has been circulated this week as a Dear Colleague letter by Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY)).

Of note:

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Mike Flynn

Obama Stimulus Numbers: The Return of Enron-Style Accounting

by Mike Flynn

The Sarbanes-Oxley Law was rushed through Congress in the wake of an enormous corporate accounting scandal that shook Wall Street and investors across the country. CEO’s and officers at several large companies were found to have “cooked the books”; i.e. knowingly falsified earnings statements to maintain stock prices or propel them higher. The practice came to be known as, Enron-Style Accounting.

enron

The new law had many provisions, but one of its more sweeping was the requirement that corporate officers and executives assume personal responsibility for the accuracy and completeness of financial reports. In some cases, corporate officers could face civil or even criminal penalties if the numbers they reported to the public turned out to be inaccurate.

If only the law applied to politicians.

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Matthew Vadum

The Soros Plan To Kill Capitalism

by Matthew Vadum

Having purchased, rented, or placed a down payment on all the political influence up for sale in America, leftist troublemaker George Soros now plans to ramp up his war on markets worldwide by creating an “Institute for New Economic Thinking” (INET).

“The system we have now has actually broken down, only we haven’t quite recognized it and so you need to create a new one and this is the time to do it,” Soros told the Financial Times last month.

Soros said he wants Communist China to run this new financial system. “You really need to bring China into the creation of a new world order, a financial world order,” Soros said.

If that doesn’t send a chill down the spines of freedom lovers in America and elsewhere, nothing will.

In an interview with Der Spiegel last year Soros said European-style socialism “is exactly what we need now. I am against market fundamentalism. I think this propaganda that government involvement is always bad has been very successful — but also very harmful to our society.”

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