Viewers of President Barack Obama’s “60 Minutes” interview Sunday night may have come away confused about his regulatory policy.
Obama first boasted to CBS’s Steve Kroft that he has lowered taxes on families, and has issued fewer regulations than his predecessor, President George W. Bush.
“Taxes are lower on families than they’ve been, probably, in the last 50 years,” Obama said. “So I haven’t raised taxes. I’ve cut taxes for middle class families by an average of $3,600 per typical family.”
“When it comes to regulations, I’ve issued fewer regulations than my predecessor George Bush did during that same period in office. So it’s kind of hard to argue that we’ve overregulated. Now, I don’t make any apologies for putting in place regulations to make sure banks don’t make reckless bets and then expect taxpayers to bail them out. I don’t make any apologies for regulating insurance companies, so that they can’t drop a family’s coverage, just when somebody in their family needs it most.”
But thirty second later, after suggesting Bush instituted more regulations than he did during an equivalent time in office, President Obama warned that Bush’s strategy of rolling back regulations wasn’t something to be emulated.
“And, you know, the problem that Gov. Romney has is that he seems to only have one note: tax cuts for the wealthy and rolling back regulations as a recipe for success,” he added. “Well, we tried that vigorously between 2001 and 2008. And it didn’t work out so well.”